Nix language evaluation bug?

Hi, I’ve been using nix for my development environment recently, and stumbled upon a strange behavior in nix that I can’t wrap my head around. My nix file is pretty complicated, but the problem I am facing can be reproduced with a simple nix expression on latest nixpkgs(unstable):

  1. This succeeds:
nix-build -E 'with import <nixpkgs>{}; nix'
  1. This fails:
nix-build -E 'with import <nixpkgs> {}; let unused = {whatever.extensions =[];}; in nix' --show-trace

Error:

error: assertion '(final).hasSharedLibraries' failed

       at /nix/store/svn32a4sxwkcgq1nvfm7sgmsmvqql8my-nixpkgs/nixpkgs/lib/systems/default.nix:89:25:

           88|       extensions = rec {
           89|         sharedLibrary = assert final.hasSharedLibraries;
             |                         ^
           90|           /**/ if final.isDarwin  then ".dylib"

Note that changing “extensions” attr to any other name, solves the problem.

What I can’t understand is how can anything I declare inside my own nix file affect derivations in ? thanks.

4 Likes

https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/8701

https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/244045

1 Like