| 7 Apr 2026 |
 goldstein | maybe they failed for another reason earlier, maybe these repos just weren’t in the sample | 17:15:36 |
| goldstein | maybe all the inputs were explicitly passed, so this code path was never reached | 17:15:57 |
 zoë (she/her) | ok so what was the point of having the registry as a separate thing? ;-; | 17:16:18 |
| zoë (she/her) | oooh wait is the registry only used at locking time? and not runtime? | 17:16:31 |
| goldstein | nix channels are just for nixpkgs, registries can hold all sorts of stuff | 17:16:38 |
| goldstein | the current global registry holds an unreasonable amount of random repos | 17:16:55 |
| goldstein | for a reason I cannot comprehend | 17:17:02 |
| goldstein | but you can also use it for local aliases and stuff | 17:17:12 |
 accelbread | Ive used them for work so a bunch of flakes choose same rev to pin to | 17:17:15 |
| goldstein | yeah, kinda, but you also use them “at runtime” when you write, like, nix shell nixpkgs#hello | 17:17:29 |
| accelbread | you can override the global registry with a flake setting iirc | 17:17:46 |
| zoë (she/her) | right right | 17:17:50 |
| goldstein | yeah you can | 17:17:53 |
| zoë (she/her) | ok sorry for the dumb question then ;-; | 17:18:15 |
| accelbread | not a dumb question, situation is a mess lol | 17:19:12 |
| zoë (she/her) | yeah i basically just use the local registry to add nixpkgs for these commands (such that it is the same as the one in my nix path (which is itself based on my system config's npins)), and that's about it | 17:20:09 |
| goldstein | you can also name it n to save yourself 6 keystrokes lol | 17:20:41 |
| zoë (she/her) | for the repl i still do -f <nixpkgs> because the whole legacyPackages.blabla stuff is kinda dumb (thanks to whoever implemented the -f and -E things for all installable lifesaver btw) | 17:21:16 |
| zoë (she/her) | * for the repl i still do -f <nixpkgs> because the whole legacyPackages.blabla stuff is kinda dumb (thanks to whoever implemented the -f and -E things for all installables btw, lifesaver) | 17:21:26 |
| zoë (she/her) | lol didn't think about that | 17:21:40 |
| zoë (she/her) | i might extend nix-debug to work for nix shell now that i actually have that setup now that i think about it | 17:22:15 |
| accelbread | nix run self starts a transient self-contained version of my emacs setup lol | 17:23:05 |
| accelbread | wait, even if something is in the local registry, you cant use it if you are online or the global registry is not reachable?? Thats cursed | 17:29:34 |
| goldstein | you totally can | 17:29:55 |
| accelbread | * wait, even if something is in the local registry, you cant use it if you are offline or the global registry is not reachable?? Thats cursed | 17:29:56 |
| goldstein | if it resolves to something that’s available locally | 17:30:02 |
| goldstein | global registry shouldn’t factor there at all | 17:30:14 |
| goldstein | registry is basically just rewrite rules: “if you see flakeref that looks like this, replace it with a flakeref that looks like that” | 17:30:57 |
| goldstein | (btw in lix global registry is vendored, so it’s fully offline; cppnix uses cached download) | 17:31:28 |
| accelbread | ahh i was testing some cppnix stuff
it doesnt allow any registry use if global registry is not cached
| 17:34:32 |
