I imagine this was supposed to be rustc = args.rustc, like the other
two lines. This meant that we accepted both rust and rustc
attributes, with the same effect. I doubt anybody was using the
undocumented, probably-accidental "rust" spelling, but we should
remove it before somebody starts.
In fact, we don't need to set rustc here at all, because no value
platforms.select could return will ever include a rustc key (unlike
the other two), so then rustc will be filled in later, when args is
merged into final.
This is to avoid stealing keys from submodules. `class` might be
common enough that reinterpreting existing `class` attributes in
configurations as a declaration leads to fairly widespread problems.
This is appears to be a fairly common mistake for beginners who want
to build larger things from the system configurations, such as NixOps
networks, etc. Further explanation seems appropriate.
The supposedly public nature of these functions has been holding
back module system maintenance, while usages of these functions
are expected to be rare. If used anywhere, presumably they're
emulating module system behavior because some use case isn't supported
properly. We should try to support such a use case directly, if it
even exists.
Some options have their default value set in the `config` instead of
`default`, for example to push `mkDefault`s down an attribute set.
In those cases, it's useful to provide a `defaultText` for informational
purposes.
Previously, there was no way to unset an option when overriding a
kernel, apart from writing out the attrset yourself. Now it's
possible with lib.mkForce lib.kernel.unset. It's important to be able
to do this, because setting an option in the override may cause other
options to become unused, which would fail the config build unless
they were overridden too.
It makes sense to allow platform definitions to opt out of having libc
at all. One use case would be targetting some obscure new Linux
target that doesn't have a libc implementation yet, and another is
UEFI, which is basically libc-less Windows.
Not having libc is not commonly specified in (GNU) triples (even
Linux's build system will just target either -gnu or -musl depending
on the platform), so instead, we use a separate attribute for it.
