Improve "illegal path references in fixed output derivation" error #12
Conversation
The main improvement is that the new message gives an example of a path that is referenced, which should make it easier to track down. While there, I also clarified the wording, saying exactly why the paths in question were illegal.
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+1 |
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Oh dear we didn't notice this because this is not the recommended way to contribute to lix (gerrit.lix.systems is the normal way) and it didn't get mentioned in the issue suggesting we should fix this either. I'll try to remember to deal with it at work tomorrow. Thank you for porting this! |
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This is the bug report on our end: https://git.lix.systems/lix-project/lix/issues/530
I don't think this is necessarily a good solution: it shows just one path for some reason (saving screen space?), and the paths that are checked for are a quite finite list: it's the inputs of the FOD. So I don't know why one would limit it to just one.
No worries :) I'm not at all in a rush. I know this isn't the ideal way to contribute but I don't think I'll become a serial contributor (to either Lix or Nix) so I didn't fancy creating a new user account just for this little patch.
The reason is that I initially intended it to just be a kind of starting point for a discussion of a better solution, so I didn't try very hard; I am neither a Nix/Lix native nor a C++ native, so I didn't know how to do something better and didn't fancy spending the time to learn. I think mostly the code in the issue you link is better, although I like my wording change more, so maybe combining both would be best? But I have even less time to contribute to this than I did when I made the patch, so mostly this is up to you now I think :) |
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I opened https://gerrit.lix.systems/c/lix/+/2726 and added you as co-author |
nice! it's now different enough from my patch that I don't know if I deserve the credit, but I guess it doesn't cost anything :) |
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Closing in favor of the Gerrit CL, let's continue the discourse there. Many thanks to everyfew here! You all are awesome. |
This was just merged into nix, see:
I've asked about this on Matrix and to the best of my knowledge there's no automatic means by which Nix patches make it over here, so I thought I'd just make the PR again. Happy for this to be closed / ignored if the change would make it into Lix eventually regardless.
I also haven't specifically tested this in Lix. I tested that it built but since it's a simple change, I'm hoping you'll find the Nix testing sufficient. Let me know if not (though realistically I might not have time to do more particularly soon.)
Motivation
Improving a somewhat-maligned Nix error message (the issue above has links to people complaining about this one).