Note: clarify naming requirement for type=process

[tomberek]

Note the mismatch between the name of the job and the variable it is referred to as "job" vs "jobXX".

# services.nix
  job = {
    name = "jobXX";
    pkg = pkgs.callPackage ./job-package.nix {};
    dependsOn = {};
    type = "process";
  };
#dist.nix
job = [ infrastructure.machine1];

This will fail with a difficult to understand error:

disnix-env -s services.nix -i infra.nix -d dist.nix
[coordinator]: Building manifest...
error: value is a string while a set was expected
(use '--show-trace' to show detailed location information)

Changing it to name="job" removes the error and makes the system work as expected. This is documented in the manual:

Every service has a canonical name, so that it is known to which one is referred from the inter-dependency arguments. This name must match the attribute name.

An error message pointing people to this possibility or detecting it (or removing this constraint?) would be helpful.

[svanderburg]

Agreed. However, due to laziness etc. it's not that easy to make error checking very robust.

In the current development version. I significantly revised the entire process that consumes the input models and applies all the required transformations to generate a manifest file. See: https://sandervanderburg.blogspot.com/2020/07/a-new-input-model-transformation.html

Maybe that implementation will already be doing a much better job.