Immensely helpful when you want to see the changes a function makes to
its value as it passes through.
Example:
```
$ nix-instantiate --strict --eval -E '(with import ./lib; traceFnSeqN 2 "id" (x: x) { a.b.c = 3; })'
trace: {
fn = "id";
from = {
a = {
b = {…};
};
};
to = {
a = {
b = {…};
};
};
}
{ a = { b = { c = 3; }; }; }
```
Nix can perform static scope checking, but whenever code is inside
a `with` expression, the analysis breaks down, because it can't
know statically what's in the attribute set whose attributes were
brought into scope. In those cases, Nix has to assume that
everything works out.
Except it doesnt. Removing `with` from lib/ revealed an undefined
variable in an error message.
If that doesn't convince you that we're better off without `with`,
I can tell you that this PR results in a 3% evaluation performance
improvement because Nix can look up local variables by index.
This adds up with applications like the module system.
Furthermore, removing `with` makes the binding site of each
variable obvious, which helps with comprehension.
Documents functions in `lib.debug` for docs generation with nixdoc.
Note that type signatures and clearer descriptions are still missing
on some of these functions, but this is good enough for a first run.
The function isn’t used anywhere and `addErrorContext` is an undocumented
builtin.
The builtin is explicitely qualified at its two uses in the module system.
`attrNamesToStr` is very specific (and pretty trivial), so it doesn’t make sense
to have it in the library.
`traceXMLVal(Marked)` are just a builtin and `trace` and not very useful in
general (trace output should not be parsed anyway).
Among other things, this will allow *2nix tools to output plain data
while still being composable with the traditional
callPackage/.override interfaces.
This does break the API of being able to import any lib file and get
its libs, however I'm not sure people did this.
I made this while exploring being able to swap out docFn with a stub
in #2305, to avoid functor performance problems. I don't know if that
is going to move forward (or if it is a problem or not,) but after
doing all this work figured I'd put it up anyway :)
Two notable advantages to this approach:
1. when a lib inherits another lib's functions, it doesn't
automatically get put in to the scope of lib
2. when a lib implements a new obscure functions, it doesn't
automatically get put in to the scope of lib
Using the test script (later in this commit) I got the following diff
on the API:
+ diff master fixed-lib
11764a11765,11766
> .types.defaultFunctor
> .types.defaultTypeMerge
11774a11777,11778
> .types.isOptionType
> .types.isType
11781a11786
> .types.mkOptionType
11788a11794
> .types.setType
11795a11802
> .types.types
This means that this commit _adds_ to the API, however I can't find a
way to fix these last remaining discrepancies. At least none are
_removed_.
Test script (run with nix-repl in the PATH):
#!/bin/sh
set -eux
repl() {
suff=${1:-}
echo "(import ./lib)$suff" \
| nix-repl 2>&1
}
attrs_to_check() {
repl "${1:-}" \
| tr ';' $'\n' \
| grep "\.\.\." \
| cut -d' ' -f2 \
| sed -e "s/^/${1:-}./" \
| sort
}
summ() {
repl "${1:-}" \
| tr ' ' $'\n' \
| sort \
| uniq
}
deep_summ() {
suff="${1:-}"
depth="${2:-4}"
depth=$((depth - 1))
summ "$suff"
for attr in $(attrs_to_check "$suff" | grep -v "types.types"); do
if [ $depth -eq 0 ]; then
summ "$attr" | sed -e "s/^/$attr./"
else
deep_summ "$attr" "$depth" | sed -e "s/^/$attr./"
fi
done
}
(
cd nixpkgs
#git add .
#git commit -m "Auto-commit, sorry" || true
git checkout fixed-lib
deep_summ > ../fixed-lib
git checkout master
deep_summ > ../master
)
if diff master fixed-lib; then
echo "SHALLOW MATCH!"
fi
(
cd nixpkgs
git checkout fixed-lib
repl .types
)
Nix style seems to have settled on not using spaces between bound
variable names and the lambda : so I also tried to make those somewhat
more consistent throughout.
Replace the implementation by seq and add a deprecation warning.
The semantics seems a little bit off, but the function should only be
used for debugging.
