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.
