Commit graph

100 commits

Author SHA1 Message Date
John Ericson f99e468640 Avoid <name>/<name> in documentation URLs
They are redundant and look weird.
2023-11-30 09:37:32 -05:00
Valentin Gagarin 4ba8b182be document store objects in terms of their constituent parts
this also rephrases the introductory sentence to be more general, in order to
avoid the same word being repeated in short succession.
2023-11-02 06:01:30 +01:00
Valentin Gagarin 8d9e0b7aed
document the store concept (#9206)
* document the store concept and its purpose

reword the glossary to link to more existing information instead of
repeating it.

move the store documentation to the top of the table of contents, in
front of the Nix language. this will provide a natural place to
document other aspects of the store as well as the various store types.

move the package management section after the Nix language and before
Advanced Topics to follow the pattern to layer more complex concepts on
top of each other.

this structure of the manual will also nudge beginners to learn Nix
bottom-up and hopefully make more likely that they understand underlying
concepts first before delving into complex use cases that may or may not
be easy to implement with what's currently there.

[John adds this note] The sort of beginner who likes to dive straight into reference documentation should prefer this approach. Conversely, the sort of beginner who would prefer the opposite top-down approach of trying to solve problems before they understand everything that is going on is better off reading other tutorial/guide material anyways, and will just "random-access" the reference manual as a last resort. For such random-access the order doesn't matter, so this restructure doesn't make them any worse off.

Co-authored-by: John Ericson <git@JohnEricson.me>
2023-10-25 02:28:35 +00:00
Valentin Gagarin 7bf17f8825
Add description for file system objects (#8500)
While this is not actually a notion in the implementation, it is
explicitly described in the thesis and quite important for understanding
how the store works.

Co-authored-by: John Ericson <git@JohnEricson.me>
Co-authored-by: Robert Hensing <roberth@users.noreply.github.com>
2023-06-18 23:45:08 -04:00
Christina Sørensen 741f7837f8
Fix wikipedia links (#8533) 2023-06-17 09:06:17 +00:00
Robert Hensing e79f935718 doc/manual: Fix broken internal links
The targets I could find.
2023-01-10 22:30:41 +01:00
Valentin Gagarin c162c90b43 add more explanation to diagrams
this is to help reading the diagrams, otherwise arrows and labels were
reported as being ambiguous.
2022-12-20 09:59:59 +01:00
Valentin Gagarin 4ed8bb1cb1 suggestions from review 2022-12-12 14:29:24 +01:00
Valentin Gagarin 9d20a056c8 remove external link
the language has its own overview page where its properties are
described in sufficient detail.
2022-11-09 01:36:17 +01:00
Valentin Gagarin 3d716df7ce make diagrams compatible with svgbob
this will at some point enable rendering them nicely for the web
2022-11-09 01:29:01 +01:00
Valentin Gagarin 98447c1a7f clarify subject of sentence
Co-authored-by: Bryan Honof <bryan.honof@tweag.io>
2022-11-09 01:29:01 +01:00
Valentin Gagarin b5728ace5d add articles 2022-11-09 01:29:01 +01:00
Valentin Gagarin be8744f937 manual: architecture overview
these changes were not merged properly and had to be reverted.

see merge commit d8e54d19f7 for full
history leading up to here.
2022-11-09 01:29:01 +01:00
Valentin Gagarin d8e54d19f7 Revert "Merge pull request #6420 from nix-community/doc-what-is-nix"
This reverts commit 81e101345f, reversing
changes made to 7d1280bbaf.
2022-08-22 12:52:15 +02:00
John Ericson 39d32ac4c6 Add disclaimer that arch section is WIP and links may rot
So we can iterate without worrying so much.
2022-08-04 14:02:58 -04:00
John Ericson 6f6498f59c Remove header fragments which is not needd 2022-08-04 14:02:38 -04:00
John Ericson 016d7a8f78 Fix rosetta stone file name 2022-08-04 14:02:19 -04:00
Valentin Gagarin b631742277 fix page rendering
apparently it is not possible to link to page anchors with `mdBook`[1]

[1]: https://github.com/rust-lang/mdBook/issues/167
2022-08-04 14:31:33 +02:00
Valentin Gagarin cc3a5f4ba2 use correct mdBook syntax for callouts 2022-08-04 14:04:14 +02:00
Valentin Gagarin 8cec32e7f5 fix directory tree renderings 2022-08-04 13:51:35 +02:00
Valentin Gagarin 3df1ee2ba5 clarify what explicitly declaring certain dependencies means 2022-08-04 12:37:48 +02:00
Valentin Gagarin db6faf44a9 clarify what store objects can be
the store of course makes a distinction, but that is not relevant here
2022-08-04 12:37:48 +02:00
Valentin Gagarin 0228eb8ae7 add Java example on manual dependency declaration 2022-08-04 12:37:48 +02:00
Valentin Gagarin 29c062537d hashes: truncate -> reduce, mention SHA-256
the longer SHA-256 hashes are not truncated, but in fact processed.

Co-authored-by: Thomas <twatson52@mac.com>
2022-08-04 12:37:48 +02:00
Valentin Gagarin 9cabba1fc3 mention hard links
Co-authored-by: Thomas <twatson52@mac.com>
2022-08-04 12:37:48 +02:00
Valentin Gagarin bac86231ad use "build plan" consistently 2022-08-04 12:37:47 +02:00
Valentin Gagarin 5a5a95696f note customized base32
Nix omits E O U T characters for some reason.
2022-08-04 12:37:47 +02:00
Valentin Gagarin de5dea45f7 use correct Nix entity
Nix itself does care a lot about what type of store object you have.
2022-08-04 12:37:47 +02:00
Valentin Gagarin fe4c0b8d75 fix typo
Co-authored-by: Thomas <twatson52@mac.com>
2022-08-04 12:37:47 +02:00
Valentin Gagarin def80d5777 add subsections to table of contents 2022-08-04 12:37:47 +02:00
Valentin Gagarin c345345dee concept map: align hights
this has the weird but nice emergent property that terms at the same
height are roughly at the same level of abstraction.
2022-08-04 12:37:47 +02:00
Valentin Gagarin a28d6878b2 concept map: put closure as it is in the chapter
this is not as compact any more, but it more closely resembles the
chapter structure, and clearly shows that the closure property is the
key idea on which most of Nix operates.
2022-08-04 12:37:47 +02:00
Valentin Gagarin 475a332025 make concept map even more compact 2022-08-04 12:37:47 +02:00
Valentin Gagarin d8b2f9f772 make concept map more compact
invert arrows to/from derivation:
- we need closures to form derivations
- we need derivations to perform builds
2022-08-04 12:37:47 +02:00
Valentin Gagarin 348432f48f store: add concept map
this should help nativate the chapter by indicating which terms should
be known to understand a given concept.
2022-08-04 12:37:47 +02:00
Valentin Gagarin ec43977553 store: match chapter introduction to outline
the various levels of detail should describe the same things.
2022-08-04 12:37:47 +02:00
Valentin Gagarin 7c656d90ca simplify description of diagram
try not to be too fancy, it's just for reading the diagram out loud.
2022-08-04 12:37:47 +02:00
Valentin Gagarin 631ca18ee6 reword notes on copying
clarify that we are copying between different stores. we have not
introduced that notion or why it would be interesting, but for now it
should be fine to keep it in context of the store directory.

we could move that later to a more detailed explanation of different
store types.
2022-08-04 12:37:47 +02:00
Valentin Gagarin c10dcccccd make example a simple list
using JSON notation is unwarranted and not explained.
2022-08-04 12:37:47 +02:00
Valentin Gagarin 9c544813d7 paths -> path
use singular for terminology uniformly
2022-08-04 12:37:47 +02:00
Valentin Gagarin 1681f4e9f3 better explain reference scanning 2022-08-04 12:37:47 +02:00
Valentin Gagarin fa7ad4593d explain store directory 2022-08-04 12:37:47 +02:00
Valentin Gagarin f632816cba add explanation and examples of file system objects 2022-08-04 12:37:47 +02:00
Valentin Gagarin 84ddfbf8fd remove diagonal from operations diagram 2022-08-04 12:37:47 +02:00
Valentin Gagarin 93f721b0d2 remove draft on derivations 2022-08-04 12:37:47 +02:00
Valentin Gagarin 19d8a5d839 move first mention of file system object before diagram 2022-08-04 12:37:47 +02:00
Valentin Gagarin a90fc62b61 make clear that file system is for processes
Co-authored-by: John Ericson <John.Ericson@Obsidian.Systems>
2022-08-04 12:37:47 +02:00
Valentin Gagarin 7993ba1f38 constrain garbage collection scope
garbage collection is now incremental, and may (in theory) never delete all unreferenced objects if it is slow enough.
2022-08-04 12:37:47 +02:00
Valentin Gagarin 195aa28ff7 references are added according to build task
at this level of abstraction we do not really care about build instructions or what they are, and also build instructions including their arguments really amount to the build task.
2022-08-04 12:37:47 +02:00
Valentin Gagarin 80de4a4804 operations diagram: store' to the right
this also looks more diverse, hopefully easier to distinguish

Co-authored-by: John Ericson <John.Ericson@Obsidian.Systems>
2022-08-04 12:37:47 +02:00