[Nix-dev] Tweak to baseNameOf semantics (POTENTIAL BREAKING CHANGE)

[Shea Levy]

Hi all,

I've just opened a pull request [1] to change the baseNameOf primop to
not copy paths to the store before returning their base name.
Essentially, this means that (baseNameOf ./foo) will return "foo" and
not "somenixhash-foo" (or, worse, failure if foo does not exist). In my
opinion this is the correct semantics, and I highly doubt anyone depends
on the current behavior, but because this is a breaking language change
I wanted to send this out for comment before anything is merged.

Note that (baseNameOf (toString ./foo)) *will* work as expected, so if
anyone does object to this it is not a huge loss.

~Shea

[1]: https://github.com/NixOS/nix/pull/376