A modern, delicious implementation of the Nix package manager, focused on correctness, usability, and growth — and committed to doing right by its community
5a34a473dd
This closes #3026 by allowing `builtins.readFile` to read a file with a wrongly reported file size, for example, files in `/proc` may report a file size of 0. Reading file in `/proc` is not a good enough motivation, however I do think it just makes nix more robust by allowing more file to be read. Especially, I do considerer the previous behavior to be dangerous because nix was previously reading truncated files. Examples of file system which incorrectly report file size may be network file system or dynamic file system (for performance reason, a dynamic file system such as FUSE may generate the content of the file on demand). ``` nix-repl> builtins.readFile "/proc/version" "" ``` With this commit: ``` nix-repl> builtins.readFile "/proc/version" "Linux version 5.6.7 (nixbld@localhost) (gcc version 9.3.0 (GCC)) #1-NixOS SMP Thu Apr 23 08:38:27 UTC 2020\n" ``` Here is a summary of the behavior changes: - If the reported size is smaller, previous implementation was silently returning a truncated file content. The new implementation is returning the correct file content. - If a file had a bigger reported file size, previous implementation was failing with an exception, but the new implementation is returning the correct file content. This change of behavior is coherent with this pull request. Open questions - The behavior is unchanged for correctly reported file size, however performances may vary because it uses the more complex sink interface. Considering that sink is used a lot, I don't think this impacts the performance a lot. - `builtins.readFile` on an infinite file, such as `/dev/random` may fill the memory. - it does not support adding file to store, such as `${/proc/version}`. |
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Nix, the purely functional package manager
Nix is a new take on package management that is fairly unique. Because of its purity aspects, a lot of issues found in traditional package managers don't appear with Nix.
To find out more about the tool, usage and installation instructions, please read the manual, which is available on the Nix website at https://nixos.org/nix/manual.
Contributing
Take a look at the Hacking Section of the manual. It helps you to get started with building Nix from source.
License
Nix is released under the LGPL v2.1