I recently wrote some Nix code where I wrongly set a value to an option
which wasn't an actual option, but an attr-set of options. The mistake I
made can be demonstrated with an expression like this:
{
foo = { lib, pkgs, config, ... }: with lib; {
options.foo.bar.baz = mkOption {
type = types.str;
};
config.foo.bar = 23;
};
}
While it wasn't too hard to find the cause of the mistake for me, it was
necessary to have some practice in reading stack traces from the module
system since the eval-error I got was not very helpful:
error: --- TypeError --------------------------------------------------------- nix-build
at: (323:25) in file: /nix/store/3nm31brdz95pj8gch5gms6xwqh0xx55c-source/lib/modules.nix
322| foldl' (acc: module:
323| acc // (mapAttrs (n: v:
| ^
324| (acc.${n} or []) ++ f module v
value is an integer while a set was expected
(use '--show-trace' to show detailed location information)
I figured that such an error can be fairly confusing for someone who's
new to NixOS, so I decided to catch this case in th `byName` function in
`lib/modules.nix` by checking if the value to map through is an actual
attr-set. If not, a different error will be thrown.
PPC64 supports two ABIs: ELF v1 and v2.
ELFv1 is historically what GCC and most packages expect, but this is
changing because musl outright does not work with ELFv1. So any distro
which uses musl must use ELFv2. Many other platforms are moving to ELFv2
too, such as FreeBSD (as of v13) and Gentoo (as of late 2020).
Since we use musl extensively, let's default to ELFv2.
Nix gives us the power to specify this declaratively for the entire
system, so ELFv1 is not dropped entirely. It can be specified explicitly
in the target config, e.g. "powerpc64-unknown-linux-elfv1". Otherwise the
default is "powerpc64-unknown-linux-elfv2". For musl,
"powerpc64-unknown-linux-musl" must use elfv2 internally to function.
Previously the .enable option was used to encode the condition as well,
which lead to some oddness:
- In order to encode an assertion, one had to invert it
- To disable a check, one had to mkForce it
By introducing a separate .check option this is solved because:
- It can be used to encode assertions
- Disabling is done separately with .enable option, whose default can be
overridden without a mkForce
Previously this option was thought to be necessary to avoid infinite
recursion, but it actually isn't, since the check evaluation isn't fed
back into the module fixed-point.
- These symbols can be confusing for those not familiar with them
- There's no harm in making these more obvious
- Terminals may not print them correctly either
Also changes the function argument printing slightly to be more obvious
`toHex` converts the given positive integer to a string of the hexadecimal
representation of that integer. For example:
```
toHex 0 => "0"
toHex 16 => "10"
toHex 250 => "FA"
```
`toBase base i` converts the positive integer `i` to a list of it
digits in the given `base`. For example:
```
toBase 10 123 => [ 1 2 3 ]
toBase 2 6 => [ 1 1 0 ]
toBase 16 250 => [ 15 10 ]
```
