Lore overrides have been included with binlore's source up to now, but
this hasn't worked very well. (It isn't as easy to self-service for
people working in nixpkgs, and its use of partial pnames for matching
breaks down around some edge cases like version numbers appearing
early in perl pnames, or multiple packages having identical pnames.)
Add new command `nixos-rebuild list-generations`. It will show an output
like
```
$ nixos-rebuild list-generations
Generation Build-date NixOS version Kernel Configuration Revision Specialisations
52 (current) Fri 2023-08-18 08:17:27 23.11.20230817.0f46300 6.4.10 448160aeccf6a7184bd8a84290d527819f1c552c *
51 Mon 2023-08-07 17:56:41 23.11.20230807.31b1eed 6.4.8 99ef480007ca51e3d440aa4fa6558178d63f9c42 *
```
This also mentions the change in the upcoming release notes
This commit fixes a papercut in nixos-rebuild where people wanting to
switch to a specialisation (or test one) were forced to manually figure
out the specialisation's path and run its activation script - since now,
there's a dedicated option to do just that.
This is a backwards-compatible change which doesn't affect the existing
behavior, which - to be fair - might still be considered sus by some
people, the painful scenario here being:
- you boot into specialisation `foo`,
- you run `nixos-rebuild switch`,
- whoops, you're no longer at specialisation `foo`, but you're rather
brought back to the base system.
(it's especially painful for cases where specialisation is used to load
extra drivers, e.g. Nvidia, since then launching `nixos-rebuild switch`,
while forgetting that you're inside a specialisation, can cause some
parts of your system to get accidentally unloaded.)
I've tried to mitigate that by improving specialisations so that they
create a dedicated file somewhere in `/run/current-system` containing
the specialisation's name (which `nixos-rebuild` could then use as the
default value for `--specialisation`), but I haven't been able to come
up with anything working (plus it would be a breaking change then).
Closes https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/174065
When something changes in nixos-rebuild, we must make sure the
installers still work, otherwise it might break existing setups.
The installer tests check whether nixos-rebuild works, so they are a
good lithmus test.
