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authorEelco Dolstra <e.dolstra@tudelft.nl>2009-09-15T13·01+0000
committerEelco Dolstra <e.dolstra@tudelft.nl>2009-09-15T13·01+0000
commit0dbd4638e07d224e642b52c1dd0468c3752e2479 (patch)
treed5f36157d780d04e11581d5c51989e809be8a78f /scripts
parent3bca8931e8861fa4694b1ca31ecc023149e7aa81 (diff)
* Two primops: builtins.intersectAttrs and builtins.functionArgs.
  intersectAttrs returns the (right-biased) intersection between two
  attribute sets, e.g. every attribute from the second set that also
  exists in the first.  functionArgs returns the set of attributes
  expected by a function.

  The main goal of these is to allow the elimination of most of
  all-packages.nix.  Most package instantiations in all-packages.nix
  have this form:

    foo = import ./foo.nix {
      inherit a b c;
    };

  With intersectAttrs and functionArgs, this can be written as:

    foo = callPackage (import ./foo.nix) { };

  where

   callPackage = f: args:
     f ((builtins.intersectAttrs (builtins.functionArgs f) pkgs) // args);

  I.e., foo.nix is called with all attributes from "pkgs" that it
  actually needs (e.g., pkgs.a, pkgs.b and pkgs.c).  (callPackage can
  do any other generic package-level stuff we might want, such as
  applying makeOverridable.)  Of course, the automatically supplied
  arguments can be overriden if needed, e.g.

    foo = callPackage (import ./foo.nix) {
      c = c_version_2;
    };

  but for the vast majority of packages, this won't be needed.

  The advantages are to reduce the amount of typing needed to add a
  dependency (from three sites to two), and to reduce the number of
  trivial commits to all-packages.nix.  For the former, there have
  been two previous attempts:

    - Use "args: with args;" in the package's function definition.
      This however obscures the actual expected arguments of a
      function, which is very bad.

    - Use "{ arg1, arg2, ... }:" in the package's function definition
      (i.e. use the ellipis "..." to allow arbitrary additional
      arguments), and then call the function with all of "pkgs" as an
      argument.  But this inhibits error detection if you call it with
      an misspelled (or obsolete) argument.

Diffstat (limited to 'scripts')
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