Make 'nix copy --from ssh://...' run in constant memory

For instance, this reduced the memory consumption of

  $ nix copy --from ssh://localhost --to ~/my-nix /nix/store/1n7x0yv8vq6zi90hfmian84vdhd04bgp-blender-2.79a

from 632 MiB to 16 MiB.

2 files changed, 20 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/src/libutil/archive.cc b/src/libutil/archive.cc
index f71229d8f..a1d9d3233 100644
--- a/src/libutil/archive.cc
+++ b/src/libutil/archive.cc
@@ -350,4 +350,21 @@ void restorePath(const Path & path, Source & source)
 }
 
 
+void copyNAR(Source & source, Sink & sink)
+{
+    // FIXME: if 'source' is the output of dumpPath() followed by EOF,
+    // we should just forward all data directly without parsing.
+
+    ParseSink parseSink; /* null sink; just parse the NAR */
+
+    LambdaSource wrapper([&](unsigned char * data, size_t len) {
+        auto n = source.read(data, len);
+        sink(data, n);
+        return n;
+    });
+
+    parseDump(parseSink, wrapper);
+}
+
+
 }
diff --git a/src/libutil/archive.hh b/src/libutil/archive.hh
index 8a15e849c..7a0e688e4 100644
--- a/src/libutil/archive.hh
+++ b/src/libutil/archive.hh
@@ -74,6 +74,9 @@ void parseDump(ParseSink & sink, Source & source);
 
 void restorePath(const Path & path, Source & source);
 
+/* Read a NAR from 'source' and write it to 'sink'. */
+void copyNAR(Source & source, Sink & sink);
+
 
 // FIXME: global variables are bad m'kay.
 extern bool useCaseHack;