When copying a large path causes the daemon to run out of memory, you
now get:
error: Nix daemon out of memory
instead of:
error: writing to file: Broken pipe
It's slower than ExprVar since it doesn't compute a static
displacement. Since we're not using the throw primop in the
implementation of <...> anymore, it's also not really needed.
Nix search path lookups like <nixpkgs> are now desugared to ‘findFile
nixPath <nixpkgs>’, where ‘findFile’ is a new primop. Thus you can
override the search path simply by saying
let
nixPath = [ { prefix = "nixpkgs"; path = "/my-nixpkgs"; } ];
in ... <nixpkgs> ...
In conjunction with ‘scopedImport’ (commit
c273c15cb1), the Nix search path can be
propagated across imports, e.g.
let
overrides = {
nixPath = [ ... ] ++ builtins.nixPath;
import = fn: scopedImport overrides fn;
scopedImport = attrs: fn: scopedImport (overrides // attrs) fn;
builtins = builtins // overrides;
};
in scopedImport overrides ./nixos
‘scopedImport’ works like ‘import’, except that it takes a set of
attributes to be added to the lexical scope of the expression,
essentially extending or overriding the builtin variables. For
instance, the expression
scopedImport { x = 1; } ./foo.nix
where foo.nix contains ‘x’, will evaluate to 1.
This has a few applications:
* It allows getting rid of function argument specifications in package
expressions. For instance, a package expression like:
{ stdenv, fetchurl, libfoo }:
stdenv.mkDerivation { ... buildInputs = [ libfoo ]; }
can now we written as just
stdenv.mkDerivation { ... buildInputs = [ libfoo ]; }
and imported in all-packages.nix as:
bar = scopedImport pkgs ./bar.nix;
So whereas we once had dependencies listed in three places
(buildInputs, the function, and the call site), they now only need
to appear in one place.
* It allows overriding builtin functions. For instance, to trace all
calls to ‘map’:
let
overrides = {
map = f: xs: builtins.trace "map called!" (map f xs);
# Ensure that our override gets propagated by calls to
# import/scopedImport.
import = fn: scopedImport overrides fn;
scopedImport = attrs: fn: scopedImport (overrides // attrs) fn;
# Also update ‘builtins’.
builtins = builtins // overrides;
};
in scopedImport overrides ./bla.nix
* Similarly, it allows extending the set of builtin functions. For
instance, during Nixpkgs/NixOS evaluation, the Nixpkgs library
functions could be added to the default scope.
There is a downside: calls to scopedImport are not memoized, unlike
import. So importing a file multiple times leads to multiple parsings
/ evaluations. It would be possible to construct the AST only once,
but that would require careful handling of variables/environments.
If a build log is not available locally, then ‘nix-store -l’ will now
try to download it from the servers listed in the ‘log-servers’ option
in nix.conf. For instance, if you have:
log-servers = http://hydra.nixos.org/log
then it will try to get logs from http://hydra.nixos.org/log/<base
name of the store path>. So you can do things like:
$ nix-store -l $(which xterm)
and get a log even if xterm wasn't built locally.
By preloading all inodes in the /nix/store/.links directory, we can
quickly determine of a hardlinked file was already linked to the hashed
links.
This is tolerant of removing the .links directory, it will simply
recalculate all hashes in the store.
If an inode in the Nix store has more than 1 link, it probably means that it was linked into .links/ by us. If so, skip.
There's a possibility that something else hardlinked the file, so it would be nice to be able to override this.
Also, by looking at the number of hardlinks for each of the files in .links/, you can get deduplication numbers and space savings.
