This is a convenience command to allow users who are not privileged to
create /nix/store to use Nix with regular binary caches. For example,
$ NIX_REMOTE="local?state=$HOME/nix/var&real=/$HOME/nix/store" nix run firefox bashInteractive
will download Firefox and bash from cache.nixos.org, then start a
shell in which $HOME/nix/store is mounted on /nix/store.
This is primarily to subsume the functionality of the
copy-from-other-stores substituter. For example, in the NixOS
installer, we can now do (assuming we're in the target chroot, and the
Nix store of the installation CD is bind-mounted on /tmp/nix):
$ nix-build ... --option substituters 'local?state=/tmp/nix/var&real=/tmp/nix/store'
However, unlike copy-from-other-stores, this also allows write access
to such a store. One application might be fetching substitutes for
/nix/store in a situation where the user doesn't have sufficient
privileges to create /nix, e.g.:
$ NIX_REMOTE="local?state=/home/alice/nix/var&real=/home/alice/nix/store" nix-build ...
The function builtins.fetchgit fetches Git repositories at evaluation
time, similar to builtins.fetchTarball. (Perhaps the name should be
changed, being confusing with respect to Nixpkgs's fetchgit function,
with works at build time.)
Example:
(import (builtins.fetchgit git://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs) {}).hello
or
(import (builtins.fetchgit {
url = git://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs-channels;
rev = "nixos-16.03";
}) {}).hello
Note that the result does not contain a .git directory.
If --no-build-output is given (which will become the default for the
"nix" command at least), show the last 10 lines of the build output if
the build fails.
This allows commands like "nix verify --all" or "nix path-info --all"
to work on S3 caches.
Unfortunately, this requires some ugly hackery: when querying the
contents of the bucket, we don't want to have to read every .narinfo
file. But the S3 bucket keys only include the hash part of each store
path, not the name part. So as a special exception
queryAllValidPaths() can now return store paths *without* the name
part, and queryPathInfo() accepts such store paths (returning a
ValidPathInfo object containing the full name).
