Whenever Nix attempts to realise a derivation for which a closure is
already known, but this closure cannot be realised, fall back on
normalising the derivation.
The most common scenario in which this is useful is when we have
registered substitutes in order to perform binary distribution from,
say, a network repository. If the repository is down, the
realisation of the derivation will fail. When this option is
specified, Nix will build the derivation instead. Thus, binary
installation falls back on a source installation. This option is
not the default since it is generally not desirable for a transient
failure in obtaining the substitutes to lead to a full build from
source (with the related consumption of resources).
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.
improve throughput.
* Don't build the `substitute-rev' table for now, since it caused
Theta(N^2) time and log file consumption when adding N substitutes.
Maybe we can do without it.
* A better substitute mechanism.
Instead of generating a store expression for each store path for
which we have a substitute, we can have a single store expression
that builds a generic program that is invoked to build the desired
store path, which is passed as an argument.
This means that operations like `nix-pull' only produce O(1) files
instead of O(N) files in the store when registering N substitutes.
(It consumes O(N) database storage, of course, but that's not a
performance problem).
* Added a test for the substitute mechanism.
* `nix-store --substitute' reads the substitutes from standard input,
instead of from the command line. This prevents us from running
into the kernel's limit on command line length.
Eelco Dolstra