nativeCheckInputs

[symphorien]

Description of changes

Fixes #161570

tl;dr: checkInputs used to be added to nativeBuildInputs, which means they are added to PATH but one cannot link to them when strictDeps is set. As linking to check-only libs is possible (quite common for ocaml for example) we need to distinguish

• checkInputs, added to buildInputs when doCheck is set. One can link against them.
• nativeCheckInputs, added to nativeBuildInputs when doCheck is set. They are added to PATH.
  (same for installCheck)

The PR contains manual commits to adapt the builders (mkDerivation, buildPythonPackage notably), a commit to use the new feature in ocamlPackages.batteries, and a treewide search-and-replace from checkInputs to nativeCheckInputs.

as a result hashes are unchanged except for the reverse-dependencies of ocamlPackages.batteries (8).

Supersedes https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/185406/files

This PR will inevitably accumulate merge conflicts. When it obtains enough positive reviews, I will regenerate the treewide commit and merge immediately. Maybe this can be done just after staging-next is merged?

Things done

• Built on platform(s)
  • x86_64-linux
  • aarch64-linux
  • x86_64-darwin
  • aarch64-darwin
• For non-Linux: Is sandbox = true set in nix.conf? (See Nix manual)
• Tested, as applicable:
  • NixOS test(s) (look inside nixos/tests)
  • and/or package tests
  • or, for functions and "core" functionality, tests in lib/tests or pkgs/test
  • made sure NixOS tests are linked to the relevant packages
• Tested compilation of all packages that depend on this change using nix-shell -p nixpkgs-review --run "nixpkgs-review rev HEAD". Note: all changes have to be committed, also see nixpkgs-review usage
• Tested basic functionality of all binary files (usually in ./result/bin/)
• 23.05 Release Notes (or backporting 22.11 Release notes)
  • (Package updates) Added a release notes entry if the change is major or breaking
  • (Module updates) Added a release notes entry if the change is significant
  • (Module addition) Added a release notes entry if adding a new NixOS module
  • (Release notes changes) Ran nixos/doc/manual/md-to-db.sh to update generated release notes
• Fits CONTRIBUTING.md.

[Mindavi]

I agree with the general idea of this.

[lschuermann]

@symphorien For downstream package sets which aim to target both the nixos-unstable and latest NixOS release channels (nixos-22.11), this means that for the time being, neither checkInputs or nativeCheckInputs works reliably on both (either resulting in an infinite recursion error, or no longer propagating check dependencies as it used to). Is there any reliable way to detect which one to use?

[symphorien]

A possible solution is:

${if pkgs.lib.versionAtLeast pkgs.lib.version "23.05" then "nativeCheckInputs" else "checkInputs"} = [ thedep ];

(this will fail on 23.05 older than this PR, and because the version string is different on channels and on git repositories I don't think you can make it work reliably).
Another possiblity is to manually add them to nativeBuildInputs if doCheck is true.

[nixos-discourse]

This pull request has been mentioned on NixOS Discourse. There might be relevant details there:

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/what-is-nativecheckinputs-when-should-it-be-used-instead-of-checkinputs/25329/3