This patch add a new argument to Nixpkgs default expression named "overlays".
By default, the value of the argument is either taken from the environment variable `NIXPKGS_OVERLAYS`,
or from the directory `~/.nixpkgs/overlays/`. If the environment variable does not name a valid directory
then this mechanism would fallback on the home directory. If the home directory does not exists it will
fallback on an empty list of overlays.
The overlays directory should contain the list of extra Nixpkgs stages which would be used to extend the
content of Nixpkgs, with additional set of packages. The overlays, i-e directory, files, symbolic links
are used in alphabetical order.
The simplest overlay which extends Nixpkgs with nothing looks like:
```nix
self: super: {
}
```
More refined overlays can use `super` as the basis for building new packages, and `self` as a way to query
the final result of the fix-point.
An example of overlay which extends Nixpkgs with a small set of packages can be found at:
https://github.com/nbp/nixpkgs-mozilla/blob/nixpkgs-overlay/moz-overlay.nix
To use this file, checkout the repository and add a symbolic link to
the `moz-overlay.nix` file in `~/.nixpkgs/overlays` directory.
Introduce new abstraction, `stdenv/booter.nix` for composing bootstraping
stages, and use it everywhere for consistency. See that file for more doc.
Stdenvs besides Linux and Darwin are completely refactored to utilize this.
Those two, due to their size and complexity, are minimally edited for
easier reviewing.
No hashes should be changed.
- The darwin test can now force the use of the freshly-booted darwin stdenv
- The linux test now passes enough dummy arguments
This may make debugging harder, if so, check out #20889
This makes the flow of data easier to understand. There's little downside
because the args in question are already inspected by the stdenvs.
cross-compiling in particular is simpler because we don't need to worry
about overriding the config closed over by `allPackages`.
This commit changes the dependencies of stdenv, and clean-up the stdenv
story by removing the `defaultStdenv` attribute as well as the `bootStdenv`
parameter.
Before, the final bootstrapping stage's stdenv was provided by
all-packages, which was iterating multiple times over the
top-level/default.nix expression, and non-final bootstrapping stages'
stdenvs were explicitly specified with the `bootStdenv` parameter.
Now, all stages' stdenvs are specified with the `stdenv` parameter.
For non-final bootstrapping stages, this is a small change---basically just
rename the parameter.
For the final stage, top-level/default.nix takes the chosen stdenv and
makes the final stage with it.
`allPackages` is used to make all bootstrapping stages, final and
non-final alike. It's basically the expression of `stage.nix` (along with a
few partially-applied default arguments)
Note, the make-bootstrap-tools scripts are temporarily broken
This ensures that most "trivial" derivations used to build NixOS
configurations no longer depend on GCC. For commands that do invoke
gcc, there is runCommandCC.
This change is not backward compatible, in the sense that this allow you to
override the packages which used to be overriden by the last stage of
stdenv. Note, this does not mean that these packages would be used by
stdenv.
This condition used to be implicit in the sense that the stdenvOverrides
uses pkgs_6, instead of pkgs_7 as its super set, and also that each stage of
the compiler is build again the bootstrap packages of the previous stage,
thus overriden by the stdenv.override function.
