[Nix-dev] Nix 1.8 released

[Bjørn Forsman]

Hi Eelco,

On 16 December 2014 at 18:56, Eelco Dolstra <eelco.dolstra at logicblox.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm pleased to announce the availability of a new stable release of the
> Nix package manager.  Release 1.8 can be found at
[...]

Many nice features. Looking forward to try them out :-)

>   • nix-store --read-log can now fetch remote build logs. If a build log is not
>     available locally, then ‘nix-store -l’ will now try to download it from the
>     servers listed in the ‘log-servers’ option in nix.conf. For instance, if
>     you have the configuration option
>
>     log-servers = http://hydra.nixos.org/log
>
>     then it will try to get logs from http://hydra.nixos.org/log/base name of
>     the store path. This allows you to do things like:
>
>     $ nix-store -l $(which xterm)
>
>     and get a log even if xterm wasn't built locally.

Nice!

But the first thing I think of when reading this is, why isn't log
files just one of the outputs of a derivation? We have ".dev" and
".lib" outputs, why not a ".log" derivation output? Wouldn't that be
easier?

Best regards,
Bjørn Forsman