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authorEelco Dolstra <eelco.dolstra@logicblox.com>2012-09-27T19·43-0400
committerEelco Dolstra <eelco.dolstra@logicblox.com>2012-09-27T19·49-0400
commit95c74eae269b2b9e4bc514581b5caa1d80b54acc (patch)
treef8f36185fa71202a79ed320e2a413433f957ff63 /doc/manual
parentf46612be96a70a188cd48462ac94089d3e95a36b (diff)
Allow dashes in identifiers
In Nixpkgs, the attribute in all-packages.nix corresponding to a
package is usually equal to the package name.  However, this doesn't
work if the package contains a dash, which is fairly common.  The
convention is to replace the dash with an underscore (e.g. "dbus-lib"
becomes "dbus_glib"), but that's annoying.  So now dashes are valid in
variable / attribute names, allowing you to write:

  dbus-glib = callPackage ../development/libraries/dbus-glib { };

and

  buildInputs = [ dbus-glib ];

Since we don't have a negation or subtraction operation in Nix, this
is unambiguous.
Diffstat (limited to 'doc/manual')
-rw-r--r--doc/manual/release-notes.xml5
1 files changed, 5 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/doc/manual/release-notes.xml b/doc/manual/release-notes.xml
index 0a69f43b1fc2..6fbd7c269c46 100644
--- a/doc/manual/release-notes.xml
+++ b/doc/manual/release-notes.xml
@@ -15,6 +15,11 @@
 <itemizedlist>
 
   <listitem>
+    <para>Dashes are now valid as part of identifiers and attribute
+    names.</para>
+  </listitem>
+
+  <listitem>
     <para>Nix no longer sets the immutable bit on files in the Nix
     store.  Instead, the recommended way to guard the Nix store
     against accidental modification on Linux is to make it a read-only