Documentation on "classic" commands with many sub-commands are
notoriously hard to discover due to lack of overview and anchor links.
Additionally the information on common options and environment variables
is not accessible offline in man pages, and therefore often overlooked
by readers.
With this change, each sub-command of nix-store and nix-env gets its
own page in the manual (listed in the table of contents), and each own
man page.
Also, man pages for each subcommand now (again) list common options
and environment variables. While this makes each page quite long and
some common parameters don't apply, this should still make it easier
to navigate as that additional information was not accessible on the
command line at all.
It is now possible to run 'nix-store --<subcommand> --help` to display
help pages for the given subcommand.
Co-authored-by: Valentin Gagarin <valentin.gagarin@tweag.io>
Commit 14bc3ce3d6 (0.13~43) changed the
timestamps in the Nix store from 0 to 1. Update the nix-store man
page to match.
Signed-off-by: Anders Kaseorg <andersk@mit.edu>
this avoids incorrect rendering on the man pages, since `lowdown`
neither parses the anchor syntax nor HTML.
this should rather be fixed in lowdown, as adding more anchors
would otherwise produce ever more noise and error-prone repetition.
These only functioned if a very narrow combination of conditions held:
- The result path does not yet exist (--check did not result in
repeated builds), AND
- The result path is not available from any configured substituters, AND
- No remote builders that can build the path are available.
If any of these do not hold, a derivation would be built 0 or 1 times
regardless of the repeat option. Thus, remove it to avoid confusion.
after discussing this with multiple people, I'm convinced that "build
task" is more precise: a derivation is not an action, but inert until it
is built. also it's easier to pronounce.
proposal: use "build task" for the generic concept "description of how
to derive new files from the contents of existing files". then it will
be easier to distinguish what we mean by "derivation" (a specific data
structure and Nix language value type) and "store derivation" (a
serialisation of a derivation into a file in the Nix store).
it is out of date, all over the place in level of detail, is really
about `nixpkgs`, and in general instructions should not be part of
a reference manual.
also:
- update redirects and internal links
- use "Nix language" consistently
They are equivalent according to
<https://spec.commonmark.org/0.29/#hard-line-breaks>,
and the trailing spaces tend to be a pain (because the make git
complain, editors tend to want to remove them − the `.editorconfig`
actually specifies that − etc..).
