builtins.derivation (and builtins.derivationStrict) have a number of issues:

• drvPath has a funky "DrvDeep" string context that needs to be stripped away with the scary-sounding builtins.unsafeDiscardOutputDependency.

• Mixing together environment variable and magic flags is icky (this also applies to the on-disk .drv format)

• Returning the arguments to the user provided encourages memory leaks (derivationStrict already improves on this over derivation)

• Returning the boiled-down inputs (e.g. inputSrcs, inputDrvs) is sometimes useful, and we could just return it here.

• The outputs are mixed in with the other attributes (separation of dicts and records; see JSON guideline)

• Remembers meta attributes, including such attributes as

  • meta.timeout, tracked by EvalState and/or Worker

  • meta.credentials (as in Pluggable authentication #9857 (comment))

  • meta.position (as discussed at Zurich ZHF 2024.05)

• Possibly: arbitrary other meta attributes

TODO other things

Priorities

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