Eelco Dolstra
7d38060a0d
A command like
$ nix run nixpkgs#hello
will now build the attribute 'packages.${system}.hello' rather than
'packages.hello'. Note that this does mean that the flake needs to
export an attribute for every system type it supports, and you can't
build on unsupported systems. So 'packages' typically looks like this:
packages = nixpkgs.lib.genAttrs ["x86_64-linux" "i686-linux"] (system: {
hello = ...;
});
The 'checks', 'defaultPackage', 'devShell', 'apps' and 'defaultApp'
outputs similarly are now attrsets that map system types to
derivations/apps. 'nix flake check' checks that the derivations for
all platforms evaluate correctly, but only builds the derivations in
'checks.${system}'.
Fixes #2861. (That issue also talks about access to ~/.config/nixpkgs
and --arg, but I think it's reasonable to say that flakes shouldn't
support those.)
The alternative to attribute selection is to pass the system type as
an argument to the flake's 'outputs' function, e.g. 'outputs = { self,
nixpkgs, system }: ...'. However, that approach would be at odds with
hermetic evaluation and make it impossible to enumerate the packages
provided by a flake.
Nix, the purely functional package manager
Nix is a new take on package management that is fairly unique. Because of its purity aspects, a lot of issues found in traditional package managers don't appear with Nix.
To find out more about the tool, usage and installation instructions, please read the manual, which is available on the Nix website at http://nixos.org/nix/manual.
Contributing
Take a look at the Hacking Section of the manual. It helps you to get started with building Nix from source.
License
Nix is released under the LGPL v2.1
This product includes software developed by the OpenSSL Project for use in the OpenSSL Toolkit.