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lix/doc
Maximilian Bosch 0488a0181d libcmd: allow setting nested attributes via --arg/--argstr
Closes #496

When running

    nix-build ../nixpkgs --arg config.allowUnfree true -A hello-unfree

the package `hello-unfree` is now built rather than getting an
eval-error rejecting instantiation. This is because `config.allowUnfree`
is now interpreted as nested attribute-set declaration, similar to how
it's done in `nix repl`.

To prevent sudden breakage, this behavior was carefully deprecated with
Nix throwing an error if the identifier for `--arg` is not a pure
identifier, but an expression as above.

Any kind of merging is rejected. I.e. doing

    nix-build ../nixpkgs --arg config '{cudaSupport = true;}' --arg config.allowUnfree true

is prohibited. That way we don't have to think about merge semantics for
cases like this (or even worse `--arg config 'rec { ... }'`). Another
nice side-effect of this is that we don't need to create an EvalState to
force the values and implement merging.

Change-Id: I8b560883a4468a3f32f915764b08f5fdd8fe71bb
2026-03-21 23:16:30 +01:00
..
2025-07-14 18:20:47 -07:00