Example usage doesn't work anymore

[ThibaultLemaire]

nix-doc callPackage

doesn't output anything on my system. I've tried other functions but the results are the same.

NixOS 21.03 (Okapi) x86_64
nix (Nix) 2.3.9

[lf-]

The tricky thing about the way this works is that it looks in the current directory. So you have to do it from a nixpkgs checkout. We should document this better, it's a common misunderstanding. Also if your preferred use is from the command line, I suggest the early fork of this project, manix, which is specifically designed for the interactive use case and is several times faster on account of using a cache. The unique functionality this program provides is the Nix plugin, which is, for the heavily repl oriented workflow I use to develop Nix stuff, my preferred way of looking stuff up :)

[thefossguy]

I'm on a freshly checkout nixpkgs clone on local filesystem and here's what I see so far:

$ git clone https://github.com/nixos/nixpkgs.git

$ cd nixpkgs

$ git checkout nixos-unstable

$ git rev-parse HEAD
5a09cb4b393d58f9ed0d9ca1555016a8543c2ac8

$ nix-doc tags

$ nix-doc search "buildLinux" .
Failure handling ./pkgs/test/nixpkgs-check-by-name/tests/ref-parse-failure/pkgs/by-name/aa/aa/invalid.nix: unexpected token at 28..29
Failure handling ./pkgs/test/nixpkgs-check-by-name/tests/ref-path-subexpr/pkgs/by-name/aa/aa/package.nix: error node at 46..48

The Failure handling errors are ignorable since both files are invalid but it fails to find buildLinux from the generated tags.

A grep works on the generated tags so I don't think that the generation of tags is going wrong...

$ grep buildLinux tags
buildLinux      pkgs/top-level/linux-kernels.nix        /^  buildLinux = attrs: callPackage ..\/os-specific\/linux\/kernel\/generic.nix attrs;$/;"    f
buildLinux      pkgs/top-level/all-packages.nix /^  inherit (linuxKernel) buildLinux linuxConfig kernelPatches;$/;"     m
kernelPatches   pkgs/top-level/all-packages.nix /^  inherit (linuxKernel) buildLinux linuxConfig kernelPatches;$/;"     m
linuxConfig     pkgs/top-level/all-packages.nix /^  inherit (linuxKernel) buildLinux linuxConfig kernelPatches;$/;"     m

Opening the function in vim with -t works too! Only the search sub-command seems to not work as intended/demonstrated. :)

[lf-]

search has a different and much more pessimistic heuristic than tags, i believe it only includes things that are obviously functions, and i suspect that's the most likely cause. it doesn't actually use the tags file to do the search, it's full text search over a worker pool.

i don't use search anymore, personally, because the repl feature and ctags provide quicker results.