The use case is to do a deep replacement of a dependency without rebuilding the entire tree.
For example, suppose a security hole is found in glibc and a patch released. Ideally, you'd
just rebuild everything, but that takes time, space, and CPU that you might not have, so in
the mean time you could build a safe version of, say, firefox with:
firefox-safe = replace-dependency { drv = firefox; old-dependency = glibc; new-dependency = patched-glibc; };
Building firefox-safe will rebuild glibc, but only do a simple copy/string replacement on all other dependencies
of firefox. On my system (MBP 13" mid-2012), after a new glibc had been build building firefox took around 11 seconds.
See the comments in the file for more details.
Added support code for comfortable writing of upstream data update
expressions that do not require change of layout of the updated
expressions (although they make assumptions about single assignment per
line). Also added a default for choosing file to update (it is supposed
to be default.nix in the same directory) and a one-liner for typical
sourceforge redirects (and sourceforge mirror:// handling).
Replacing SBCL upstream tracking expression with a new version in a new
format.
Minuses: gave up on defining everything in Nix language (now update
expression is a series of actions to do when downloading fresh release,
it is actually interpreted by shell), now Nix expression contains
meaningful whitespace (the area to regenerate is determined by the
line with a specific comment and the closing brace on the otherwise
empty line).
Plusses: only one extra file which could even be moved out-of-tree if
desired, clean semantics for traversing multiple links (it is not found
in either Debian uscan or Gentoo euscan), the main expression is in one
file and is less different from usual style.
Jailbreaks-cabal allows Nixpkgs maintainers to quick-fix builds of packages
that over-specify their version requirements by removing the version
restrictions of all dependencies from the Cabal file. Set
jailbreak = true
in the build expression to activate this feature.
