In Nixpkgs, the attribute in all-packages.nix corresponding to a
package is usually equal to the package name. However, this doesn't
work if the package contains a dash, which is fairly common. The
convention is to replace the dash with an underscore (e.g. "dbus-lib"
becomes "dbus_glib"), but that's annoying. So now dashes are valid in
variable / attribute names, allowing you to write:
dbus-glib = callPackage ../development/libraries/dbus-glib { };
and
buildInputs = [ dbus-glib ];
Since we don't have a negation or subtraction operation in Nix, this
is unambiguous.
much as possible. (This is similar to GNU Make's `-k' flag.)
* Refactoring to implement this: previously we just bombed out when
a build failed, but now we have to clean up. In particular this
means that goals must be freed quickly --- they shouldn't hang
around until the worker exits. So the worker now maintains weak
pointers in order not to prevent garbage collection.
* Documented the `-k' and `-j' flags.