[Nix-dev] Missing documentation

Ertugrul Söylemez ertesx at gmx.de
Sun Feb 15 02:57:11 CET 2015


Hi again everybody,

I noticed that the documentation of various Nix tools is incomplete and
often too vague, so I'd like to contribute documentation patches.  From
the top of my head the following two flags are currently undocumented:

  * `nix-store --register-validity`
  * `nix-env --set`

The latter seems pretty straightforward from the way it is used in NixOS
scripts, but the former is a bit of a mystery to me.  If someone could
give an explanation in simple prose, I'm happy to update the Nix
documentation.

Another thing I would like to do is to add an actual help system to all
Nix tools.  This means that `--help` no longer opens the man page, but
instead displays context-sensitive help.  For example

    nix-store -q --help

would display the documentation of the query functionality of
`nix-store`.  I believe, this is much more useful than opening the man
page.  Please tell me what you think about that.

Finally with some help from the community we can fix all dead
references.  For example when you read the documentation for
`exportReferencesGraph`, it refers to "the format used by `nix-store
--register-validity`", and there the reference chain breaks, because the
latter is not documented anywhere except perhaps in the source code.


Greets,
Ertugrul
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