We already have some primops for determining the type of a value, such
as isString, but they're incomplete: for instance, there is no isPath.
Rather than adding more isBla functions, the generic typeOf function
returns a string representing the type of the argument (e.g. "int").
I.e. "nix-store -q --roots" will now show (for example)
/home/eelco/Dev/nixpkgs/result
rather than
/nix/var/nix/gcroots/auto/53222qsppi12s2hkap8dm2lg8xhhyk6v
Combined with the previous changes, stack traces involving derivations
are now much less verbose, since something like
while evaluating the builtin function `getAttr':
while evaluating the builtin function `derivationStrict':
while instantiating the derivation named `gtk+-2.24.20' at `/home/eelco/Dev/nixpkgs/pkgs/development/libraries/gtk+/2.x.nix:11:3':
while evaluating the derivation attribute `propagatedNativeBuildInputs' at `/home/eelco/Dev/nixpkgs/pkgs/stdenv/generic/default.nix:78:17':
while evaluating the attribute `outPath' at `/nix/store/212ngf4ph63mp6p1np2bapkfikpakfv7-nix-1.6/share/nix/corepkgs/derivation.nix:18:9':
...
now reads
while evaluating the attribute `propagatedNativeBuildInputs' of the derivation `gtk+-2.24.20' at `/home/eelco/Dev/nixpkgs/pkgs/development/libraries/gtk+/2.x.nix:11:3':
...
Messages like
while evaluating the attribute `outPath' at `/nix/store/212ngf4ph63mp6p1np2bapkfikpakfv7-nix-1.6/share/nix/corepkgs/derivation.nix:18:9':
are redundant, because Nix already shows that it's evaluating a derivation:
while instantiating the derivation named `firefox-24.0' at `/home/eelco/Dev/nixpkgs/pkgs/applications/networking/browsers/firefox/default.nix:131:5':
while evaluating the derivation attribute `nativeBuildInputs' at `/home/eelco/Dev/nixpkgs/pkgs/stdenv/generic/default.nix:76:17':
Antiquotes should evaluate to strings or paths. This is usually
checked, except in the case where the antiquote makes up the entire
string, as in "${expr}". This is optimised to expr, which discards
the runtime type checks / coercions.
Commit 159e621d1a accidentally changed
the behaviour of antiquoted paths, e.g.
"${/foo}/bar"
used to evaluate to "/nix/store/<hash>-foo/bar" (where /foo gets
copied to the store), but in Nix 1.6 it evaluates to "/foo/bar". This
is inconsistent, since
" ${/foo}/bar"
evaluates to " /nix/store/<hash>-foo/bar". So revert to the old
behaviour.
There is no risk of getting an inconsistent result here: if the ID
returned by queryValidPathId() is deleted from the database
concurrently, subsequent queries involving that ID will simply fail
(since IDs are never reused).
In the Hydra build farm we fairly regularly get SQLITE_PROTOCOL errors
(e.g., "querying path in database: locking protocol"). The docs for
this error code say that it "is returned if some other process is
messing with file locks and has violated the file locking protocol
that SQLite uses on its rollback journal files." However, the SQLite
source code reveals that this error can also occur under high load:
if( cnt>5 ){
int nDelay = 1; /* Pause time in microseconds */
if( cnt>100 ){
VVA_ONLY( pWal->lockError = 1; )
return SQLITE_PROTOCOL;
}
if( cnt>=10 ) nDelay = (cnt-9)*238; /* Max delay 21ms. Total delay 996ms */
sqlite3OsSleep(pWal->pVfs, nDelay);
}
i.e. if certain locks cannot be not acquired, SQLite will retry a
number of times before giving up and returing SQLITE_PROTOCOL. The
comments say:
Circumstances that cause a RETRY should only last for the briefest
instances of time. No I/O or other system calls are done while the
locks are held, so the locks should not be held for very long. But
if we are unlucky, another process that is holding a lock might get
paged out or take a page-fault that is time-consuming to resolve,
during the few nanoseconds that it is holding the lock. In that case,
it might take longer than normal for the lock to free.
...
The total delay time before giving up is less than 1 second.
On a heavily loaded machine like lucifer (the main Hydra server),
which often has dozens of processes waiting for I/O, it seems to me
that a page fault could easily take more than a second to resolve.
So, let's treat SQLITE_PROTOCOL as SQLITE_BUSY and retry the
transaction.
Issue NixOS/hydra#14.
Nixpkgs's stdenv setup script sets the "nullglob" option, but doing so
breaks Bash completion on NixOS (when ‘programs.bash.enableCompletion’
is set) and on Ubuntu. So clear that flag afterwards. Of course,
this may break stdenv functions in subtle ways...
Previously, a undefined variable inside a "with" caused an EvalError
(which can be caught), while outside, it caused a ParseError (which
cannot be caught). Now both cause an UndefinedVarError (which cannot
be caught).
Since they don't have location information, they just give you crap
like:
while evaluating the builtin function `getAttr':
while evaluating the builtin function `derivationStrict':
...
If a "with" attribute set fails to evaluate, we have to make sure its
Env record remains unchanged. Otherwise, repeated evaluation gives a
segfault:
nix-repl> :a with 0; { a = x; b = x; }
Added 2 variables.
nix-repl> a
error: value is an integer while an attribute set was expected
nix-repl> b
Segmentation fault
As discovered by Todd Veldhuizen, the shell started by nix-shell has
its affinity set to a single CPU. This is because nix-shell connects
to the Nix daemon, which causes the affinity hack to be applied. So
we turn this off for Perl programs.
This is equivalent to running ‘nix-env -e '*'’ first, except that it
happens in a single transaction. Thus, ‘nix-env -i pkgs...’ replaces
the profile with the specified set of packages.
The main motivation is to support declarative package management
(similar to environment.systemPackages in NixOS). That is, if you
have a specification ‘profile.nix’ like this:
with import <nixpkgs> {};
[ thunderbird
geeqie
...
]
then after any change to ‘profile.nix’, you can run:
$ nix-env -f profile.nix -ir
to update the profile to match the specification. (Without the ‘-r’
flag, if you remove a package from ‘profile.nix’, it won't be removed
from the actual profile.)
Suggested by @zefhemel.
This prevents some duplicate evaluation in nix-env and
nix-instantiate.
Also, when traversing ~/.nix-defexpr, only read regular files with the
extension .nix. Previously it was reading files like
.../channels/binary-caches/<name>. The only reason this didn't cause
problems is pure luck (namely, <name> shadows an actual Nix
expression, the binary-caches files happen to be syntactically valid
Nix expressions, and we iterate over the directory contents in just
the right order).
Since we already cache files in normal form (fileEvalCache), caching
parse trees is redundant.
Note that getting rid of this cache doesn't actually save much memory
at the moment, because parse trees are currently not freed / GC'ed.
On a system with multiple CPUs, running Nix operations through the
daemon is significantly slower than "direct" mode:
$ NIX_REMOTE= nix-instantiate '<nixos>' -A system
real 0m0.974s
user 0m0.875s
sys 0m0.088s
$ NIX_REMOTE=daemon nix-instantiate '<nixos>' -A system
real 0m2.118s
user 0m1.463s
sys 0m0.218s
The main reason seems to be that the client and the worker get moved
to a different CPU after every call to the worker. This patch adds a
hack to lock them to the same CPU. With this, the overhead of going
through the daemon is very small:
$ NIX_REMOTE=daemon nix-instantiate '<nixos>' -A system
real 0m1.074s
user 0m0.809s
sys 0m0.098s
Nixpkgs' stdenv disables dependency tracking by default. That makes
sense for one-time builds, but in an interactive environment we expect
repeated "make" invocations to do the right thing.
Commit 20866a7031 added a ‘withAttrs’
field to Env, which is annoying because it makes every Env structure
bigger and we allocate millions of them. E.g. NixOS evaluation took
18 MiB more. So this commit squeezes ‘withAttrs’ into values[0].
Probably should use a union...
Previously, if the Nix evaluator gets a stack overflow due to a deep
or infinite recursion in the Nix expression, the user gets an
unhelpful message ("Segmentation fault") that doesn't indicate that
the problem is in the user's code rather than Nix itself. Now it
prints:
error: stack overflow (possible infinite recursion)
This only works on x86_64-linux and i686-linux.
Fixes#35.
This reverts commit 69b8f9980f.
The timeout should be enforced remotely. Otherwise, if the garbage
collector is running either locally or remotely, if will block the
build or closure copying for some time. If the garbage collector
takes too long, the build may time out, which is not what we want.
Also, on heavily loaded systems, copying large paths to and from the
remote machine can take a long time, also potentially resulting in a
timeout.
With C++ std::map, doing a comparison like ‘map["foo"] == ...’ has the
side-effect of adding a mapping from "foo" to the empty string if
"foo" doesn't exist in the map. So we ended up setting some
environment variables by accident.
In particular this means that "trivial" derivations such as writeText
are not substituted, reducing the number of GET requests to the binary
cache by about 200 on a typical NixOS configuration.
Eelco Dolstra