Incorrectly high expectations lead to frustration for users who
stick around to experience how useless it is for e.g. a devShell
https://functional.cafe/@arianvp/112976284363120036:
> Flakes doesn't have eval caching. It has command line argument
> caching. It literally just stores the cli argument you passed
> in a sqlite database and yes that's as useless as it sounds
> When I discovered flakes had no expression level caching whatsoever
> I kind of felt lied to and betrayed.
* manual: Contributing -> Development, Hacking -> Building
what's currently called "hacking" are really instructions for setting up
a development environment and compiling from source. we have
a contribution guide in the repo (which rightly focuses on GitHub
workflows), and the material in the manual is more about working
on the code itself.
since we'd otherwise have three headings that amount to "Building Nix",
this change also moves the "classic Nix" instructions to the top.
we may want to reorganise this in the future, and bring
contributor-oriented information closer to the code, but for now let's
stick to more accurate names to ease navigation.
This requires `--substitute-on-destination` if you want the remote side
to substitute instead of copying if possible.
For completeness sake, document it here.
Also, the stable Nix from nixpkgs is still 2.18, so more folks may
stumble upon this when this is bumped, so I'd expect this to be actually
useful.
Closes#10182
- Align the “frequent” release cycle with the calendar
- The 6-month release cycle is hard to keep track of. A monthly
release will make it much easier to remember the release date.
- Officialise the support for a stable version maintained for as long as NixOS stable
- This is already the case in practice, it just happens that the
“stable” Nixpkgs version is whichever version was deemed
stable-enough at the time of the NixOS release.
Officialise that by cutting a new major release alongside each NixOS one.
Note that this breaks whatever semver compatibility Nix might pretend to
have, but I don't think it makes sense any way.
As discussed in our last meeting, we need a bit more time, but we are
"time boxing" the work left to do to ensure there is not unbounded
delay.
Rather than putting it back underneath `flakes`, though, put it
underneath its own `fetch-tree` experimental feature (which `flakes`
includes/implies). This signals our commitment to the plan to stabilize
it first without waiting to go through the rest of Flakes, and also will
give users a "release candidate" when we get closer to stabilization.
This reverts commit 4112dd1fc9.
Before it returned a list of JSON objects with store object information,
including the path in each object. Now, it maps the paths to JSON
objects with the metadata sans path.
This matches how `nix derivation show` works.
Quite hillariously, none of our existing functional tests caught this
change to `path-info --json` though they did use it. So just new
functional tests need to be added.
