[Nix-dev] Re: NixOS manual: "declared by" & "defined by"

[Eelco Dolstra]

Hi,

Ludovic Courtès wrote:

> I’m not sure about the command name, but yes, that’d nice.  A ‘--manual’
> option as Marc suggests would be nice too.

Maybe we don't need a --manual, "man nixos" would be more logical.  There
already is a configuration.nix manpage, we just need to add some more manpages
(including one for nixos-rebuild).

>> I've made some modification to my manual generation which provide this
>> information (see http://nbp.name/nixos/manual.html ).
> 
> It rocks!  :-)

Indeed :-)

Just one question for Nicolas: do the "Defined by" paths include disabled values
(i.e. those under a "mkIf false ...")?

And a suggestion: we could hyperlink the filenames to the module sources, either
under file:///etc/nixos or in the SVN repo.

> Some nitpicking:
> 
>   * Could you remove ‘/trace/nixos’ from paths?
> 
>   * Could you remove the “defined by” line when it’s the empty list?
> 
>   * I’d prefer “used by” instead of “defined by”, and maybe even
>     “defined by” instead of “declared by”.

The "declare/define" terminology follows the C/C++ convention.  We've also used
it in two papers we've just submitted, so we would have to change those as well ;-)

-- 
Eelco Dolstra | http://www.st.ewi.tudelft.nl/~dolstra/