CheckMeta does not work

[piegamesde]

I just noticed that meta attributes are actually never checked locally. I noticed that there is an undocumented attribute config.checkMeta which defaults to false, but even when setting it to true and adding obvious errors to a derivation I cannot get it to fail. Ideally, such an option should be enabled by default IMO.

Arbitrarily pinging @ckiee @Artturin @ncfavier

[ncfavier]

Possibly related to #6794 (comment) ?

[piegamesde]

That issue is 😱, but I'm not sure this is the one I'm running into since even blatant errors like setting description = true; do not fail my evaluation. It really looks like the check is not running at all, but I also can't get it to work somehow.

[ncfavier]

Can you provide a minimal reproducer? That much seems to work fine for me:

with import <nixpkgs> { config.checkMeta = true; };
runCommand "foo" {
  meta.description = true;
} ""

error: Package ‘foo’ in /home/n/foo.nix:3 has an invalid meta attrset:
       	 - key 'description' has a value 1 of an invalid type bool; expected string, refusing to evaluate.

[piegamesde]

Oh no, I think I found the issue: The meta type check is not started if the package has other issues. This is a bug only surfaced through #177272. See the line else let res = checkMeta (attrs.meta or {}); in if res != [] then in check-meta.nix, it does not apply if any other conditions above matched. At the moment this only works because all entries have valid = "no"; which stops the evaluation anyways.

This should reproduce on master on insecure or unfree packages. The derivation will fail with the usual warning, but actually it should fail with "invalid meta" instead.

[ncfavier]

Can this be closed now?

[piegamesde]

I don't think we made any significant progress here, since the original fix got reverted.

[ConnorBaker]

Sorry for the bump -- @piegamesde to your knowledge, is checkMeta still effectively broken, or has something changed since?

[piegamesde]

I don't know of any changes on this