Documentation on "classic" commands with many sub-commands are
notoriously hard to discover due to lack of overview and anchor links.
Additionally the information on common options and environment variables
is not accessible offline in man pages, and therefore often overlooked
by readers.
With this change, each sub-command of nix-store and nix-env gets its
own page in the manual (listed in the table of contents), and each own
man page.
Also, man pages for each subcommand now (again) list common options
and environment variables. While this makes each page quite long and
some common parameters don't apply, this should still make it easier
to navigate as that additional information was not accessible on the
command line at all.
It is now possible to run 'nix-store --<subcommand> --help` to display
help pages for the given subcommand.
Co-authored-by: Valentin Gagarin <valentin.gagarin@tweag.io>
The motivation is as stated in issue #7814: even though the the C++ API
is internal and unstable, people still want it to be well documented for
sake of learning, code review, and other purposes that aren't predicated
on it being stable.
Fixes#7814
Co-authored-by: Robert Hensing <roberth@users.noreply.github.com>
This way the links are clearly within the manual (ie not absolute paths),
while allowing snippets to reference the documentation root reliably,
regardless of at which base url they're included.
mdbook-linkcheck is not consistent about its warning setting.
It disables some warnings, but not the warnings about lack of
fragment checking support; hence the extra filtering.
this simplifies the setup a lot, and avoids weird looking `./file.md`
links showing up.
it also does not show regular URLs any more. currently the command
reference only has few of them, and not showing them in the offline
documentation is hopefully not a big deal.
instead of building more special-case solutions, clumsily preprocessing
the input, or issuing verbal rules on dealing with URLs, should better
be solved sustainably by not rendering relative links in `lowdown`:
https://github.com/kristapsdz/lowdown/issues/105
The current docs are all "how to do things" and no "what is Nix" or "why
are things the way they are".
I see lots of misconception on the wider internet, and I also think we
would benefit from a "living document" to answer some questions people
currently turn to the thesis for.
I think a new section of the manual can address all these issues.
it is out of date, all over the place in level of detail, is really
about `nixpkgs`, and in general instructions should not be part of
a reference manual.
also:
- update redirects and internal links
- use "Nix language" consistently
Python is only pulled into the build closure by Mercurial, which might end up being removed.
Let’s port the script to jq, which is more likely to stay.
It is now possible to use the following syntax to insert anchors into the text:
[]{#anchor-name}
The anchor will allow linking to the location it is placed by appending #anchor-name to the URL.
Additionally, it is possible to create a link pointing to its own location by adding text between the square brackets:
[`--add-root`]{#opt-add-root}
- Separate the generation of the manpages from their installation
- Make sure that `make` generates the manpages
- Make sure that `make install` installs them
Fix#5051
Use a dedicated make target for the man page rather than bundling the
generation as part of `install`.
Also make sure that `make install` is a fixpoint by
- Removing the generated markdown files from `MANUAL_SRCS`
- Not having the manpage generation write in its source directory so as
to not update its timestamp (it would run each time otherwise)
This looks a lot better (and is also more semantically meaningful).
Since this list is generated in a Nix expression, I don't think using
HTML here is going to be the thing that puts people off modifying this
part of the documentation!
Since c4c3c15c19 (#4251) building Nix for
macOS with sandboxing fails:
```
getting status of /nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/root/channels/nixpkgs: Operation not permitted
```
This happens, because `EvalSettings::getDefaultNixPath` tries to access
paths outside the sandbox. Since the state-dir is not required for
doc generation, it is set to the dummy folder. This needs to be done
for all nix invocations during doc generation, as
`EvalSettings::getDefaultNixPath` is called unconditionally.
