depot - monorepo for the virus lounge

Age	Commit message (Collapse)	Author	Files	Lines
2004-08-20	* Setuid support for sharing a Nix installation between multiple	Eelco Dolstra	1	-0/+82
	users. If the configure flag `--enable-setuid' is used, the Nix programs nix-env, nix-store, etc. are installed with the setuid bit turned on so that they are executed as the user and group specified by `--with-nix-user=USER' and `--with-nix-group=GROUP', respectively (with defaults `nix' and `nix'). The setuid programs drop all special privileges if they are executed by a user who is not a member of the Nix group. The setuid feature is a quick hack to enable sharing of a Nix installation between users who trust each other. It is not generally secure, since any user in the Nix group can modify (by building an appropriate derivation) any object in the store, and for instance inject trojans into binaries used by other users. The setuid programs are owned by root, not the Nix user. This is because on Unix normal users cannot change the real uid, only the effective uid. Many programs don't work properly when the real uid differs from the effective uid. For instance, Perl will turn on taint mode. However, the setuid programs drop all root privileges immediately, changing all uids and gids to the Nix user and group.
2004-08-18	* The default verbosity level of all Nix commands is now lvlInfo.	Eelco Dolstra	1	-1/+3
	* Builder output is written to standard error by default. * The option `-B' is gone. * The option `-Q' suppresses builder output. The result of this is that most Nix invocations shouldn't need any flags w.r.t. logging.
2004-06-28	* Added a switch `--fallback'. From the manual:	Eelco Dolstra	1	-0/+2
	Whenever Nix attempts to realise a derivation for which a closure is already known, but this closure cannot be realised, fall back on normalising the derivation. The most common scenario in which this is useful is when we have registered substitutes in order to perform binary distribution from, say, a network repository. If the repository is down, the realisation of the derivation will fail. When this option is specified, Nix will build the derivation instead. Thus, binary installation falls back on a source installation. This option is not the default since it is generally not desirable for a transient failure in obtaining the substitutes to lead to a full build from source (with the related consumption of resources).
2004-06-25	* A flag `--keep-going / -k' to keep building goals if one fails, as	Eelco Dolstra	1	-0/+2
	much as possible. (This is similar to GNU Make's `-k' flag.) * Refactoring to implement this: previously we just bombed out when a build failed, but now we have to clean up. In particular this means that goals must be freed quickly --- they shouldn't hang around until the worker exits. So the worker now maintains weak pointers in order not to prevent garbage collection. * Documented the `-k' and `-j' flags.
2004-05-13	* The build hooks used to implement distributed builds can now be run	Eelco Dolstra	1	-0/+6
	in parallel. Hooks are more efficient: locks on output paths are only acquired when the hook says that it is willing to accept a build job. Hooks now work in two phases. First, they should first tell Nix whether they are willing to accept a job. Nix guarantuees that no two hooks will ever be in the first phase at the same time (this simplifies the implementation of hooks, since they don't have to perform locking (?)). Second, if they accept a job, they are then responsible for building it (on the remote system), and copying the result back. These can be run in parallel with other hooks and locally executed jobs. The implementation is a bit messy right now, though. * The directory `distributed' shows a (hacky) example of a hook that distributes build jobs over a set of machines listed in a configuration file.
2004-05-12	* A switch `-j NUMBER' to set the maximum number of parallel jobs (0 =	Eelco Dolstra	1	-3/+16
	no limit). * Add missing file to distribution.
2004-05-12	* An quick and dirty hack to support distributed builds.	Eelco Dolstra	1	-7/+0

2004-05-11	* True parallel builds. Nix can now run as many build jobs in	Eelco Dolstra	1	-2/+18
	parallel as possible (similar to GNU Make's `-j' switch). This is useful on SMP systems, but it is especially useful for doing builds on multiple machines. The idea is that a large derivation is initiated on one master machine, which then distributes sub-derivations to any number of slave machines. This should not happen synchronously or in lock-step, so the master must be capable of dealing with multiple parallel build jobs. We now have the infrastructure to support this. TODO: substitutes are currently broken.
2004-05-04	* Allow the location of the store etc. to be specified using	Eelco Dolstra	1	-12/+19
	environment variables. * Started adding some automatic tests. * Do a `make check' when building RPMs.
2004-03-27	* Disallow the Nix store or any of its parents from being symlinks.	Eelco Dolstra	1	-6/+29
	This is because the contents of these symlinks are not incorporated into the hashes of derivations, and could therefore cause a mismatch between the build system and the target system. E.g., if `/nix/store' is a symlink to `/data/nix/store', then a builder could expand this path and store the result. If on the target system `/nix/store' is not a symlink, or is a symlink that points somewhere else, we have a dangling pointer. The trigger for this change is that gcc 3.3.3 does exactly that (it applies realpath() to some files, such as libraries, which causes our impurity checker to bail out.) An annoying side-effect of this change is that it makes it harder to move the Nix store to a different file system. On Linux, bind mounts can be used instead of symlink for this purpose (e.g., `mount -o bind /data/nix/store /nix/store').
2004-03-22	* Nix now has three different formats for the log information it	Eelco Dolstra	1	-1/+18
	writes to stderr: - `pretty': the old nested style (default) - `escapes': uses escape codes to indicate nesting and message level; can be processed using `log2xml' - `flat': just plain text, no nesting These can be set using `--log-type TYPE' or the NIX_LOG_TYPE environment variable.
2004-02-14	* The environment variable NIX_ROOT can now be set to execute Nix in a	Eelco Dolstra	1	-0/+7
	chroot() environment. * A operation `--validpath' to register path validity. Useful for bootstrapping in a pure Nix environment. * Safety checks: ensure that files involved in store operations are in the store.
2004-02-02	* Sort `nix-env -q' output by derivation name.	Eelco Dolstra	1	-0/+3
	* `--version' flag for all commands. * Manual updates.
2004-01-15	* Remove debug message.	Eelco Dolstra	1	-1/+0

2004-01-15	* Catch SIGINT to terminate cleanly when the user tries to interrupt	Eelco Dolstra	1	-0/+15
	Nix. This is to prevent Berkeley DB from becoming wedged. Unfortunately it is not possible to throw C++ exceptions from a signal handler. In fact, you can't do much of anything except change variables of type `volatile sig_atomic_t'. So we set an interrupt flag in the signal handler and check it at various strategic locations in the code (by calling checkInterrupt()). Since this is unlikely to cover all cases (e.g., (semi-)infinite loops), sometimes SIGTERM may now be required to kill Nix.
2004-01-13	* Option `-B' to always show the output of builders, regardless of	Eelco Dolstra	1	-0/+2
	verbosity level.
2003-12-22	* GCC 2.95 compatibility.	Eelco Dolstra	1	-0/+3

2003-12-01	* Help text for all (non-script) programs, so no more:	Eelco Dolstra	1	-14/+25
	$ nix-instantiate --help error: unknown flag `--help` Try `nix-instantiate --help' for more information. :-)
2003-11-19	* nix-env: a tool to manage user environments.	Eelco Dolstra	1	-0/+1
	* Replace all directory reading code by a generic readDirectory() function.
2003-11-09	* Turned the msg() and debug() functions into macros, since they	Eelco Dolstra	1	-3/+3
	turned out to be a huge performance bottleneck (the text to printed would always be evaluated, even when it was above the verbosity level). This reduces fix-ng execution time by over 50%. gprof(1) is very useful. :-)
2003-11-03	* Ignore options passed to the aterm library.	Eelco Dolstra	1	-2/+5

2003-10-20	* Refactored the source tree.	Eelco Dolstra	1	-0/+79