| 25 Dec 2025 |
 emily | I think this is probably LLM slop but as someone who was on the call with GitHub I would not say this is at all a reasonable takeaway | 17:15:32 |
| emily | (GitHub scaling issues ≠ Git scaling issues, the acute GitHub scaling issues were declared provisionally resolved in the same update that talked about them and confirmed as definitely resolved in the next update, the size of the Nixpkgs repo itself is trivial factor compared to the development activity, and none of the factors in "The pattern" are remotely relevant) | 17:18:46 |
| emily | (actually the call started out with the GitHub engineer being like "is this maybe using Git as a database?" and within 5 minutes of explanation we were all on the same page of "no, it's genuinely a codebase and not a database") | 17:20:32 |
| emily | I'd say the actual painful-ish thing is just having to fetch all of Nixpkgs to evaluate a single package, but that's very difficult to fix (if IFD was really good it might work yeah) | 17:21:16 |
| emily | (FWIW, the Linux and Chromium repositories are still bigger than Nixpkgs. they just don't use GitHub forks for development so wouldn't run into GitHub backend scaling issues) | 17:22:02 |
 KFears (they/them) | In reply to @emilazy:matrix.org
I'd say the actual painful-ish thing is just having to fetch all of Nixpkgs to evaluate a single package, but that's very difficult to fix (if IFD was really good it might work yeah) I don't know what it is, but fetching Nixpkgs tarball from Github is monstrously slow | 17:52:25 |
 Arian | In reply to @kfears:matrix.org
I don't know what it is, but fetching Nixpkgs tarball from Github is monstrously slow Are you on macos | 17:52:40 |
| KFears (they/them) | It takes 20s+ on my setup, despite the tarball being 50-60MB | 17:52:56 |
| Arian | It's a bug in Lix /lib archive we've been hunting down. It takes 5 minutes to fetch for me | 17:53:08 |
 Unhooked Spirits | I'm on macOS and that sounds about right to me, too. Maybe 3 minutes for me. | 17:53:43 |
| Arian | Almost all slowness with nixpkgs is in the unpack phase. Even not on macos | 17:53:44 |
| Arian | Might be a bit better on Nix due to the new VFS stuff | 17:54:05 |
| KFears (they/them) | It's absurd that it takes so long, and it makes me think there's something about Github specifically being very slow with the tarball downloads that causes very visible UX issues | 17:54:32 |
| Arian | Has nothing to do with GitHub. The download part is fast. The unpack phase is slow | 17:54:56 |
| KFears (they/them) | In reply to @arianvp:matrix.org
Are you on macos Not, I'm not talking about recent Lix bug on MacOS, I'm talking about general Linux experience | 17:55:04 |
| Arian | The tarball API of GitHub has been flakey though since like 10 nov | 17:55:36 |
| Arian | I'm seeing a lot of 504s recently | 17:55:42 |
 toonn | I don't remember who it was but there was some work on fetching partial tarballs using some feature of zstd, no? | 17:58:56 |
 rosssmyth | You can try https://nixos.org/channels/nixos-unstable/nixexprs.tar.xz | 18:02:39 |
 Ramses 🇵🇸 | In reply to @rosssmyth:matrix.org
You can try https://nixos.org/channels/nixos-unstable/nixexprs.tar.xz This makes the download a lot faster, I switched to it a couple of months ago. Unpacking is still really slow though indeed | 19:39:50 |
 llakala | In reply to @emilazy:matrix.org
I think this is probably LLM slop but as someone who was on the call with GitHub I would not say this is at all a reasonable takeaway ty very much for your nixpkgs core team work btw. you guys are the thankless heroes helping shit actually get better | 19:50:07 |
 leona | (please use channels.nixos.org, not the redirect) | 19:53:13 |
| llakala | I'm a lot happier with my tarball times these days with npins and lix. the cppnix tarball downloads were dark days | 19:54:49 |
| llakala | although a nixpkgs `git pull` is always painful. I wish git did more logging rather than looking like it freezes | 19:55:41 |
 tea | Itd be interesting to explore a scheme where we download definitions for individual files instead of the whole tarball. Not sure how it could be made to actually scale | 22:05:49 |
| tea | the 50ish MB size of nixpkgs is not that big but just big enough to be annoying on a slow connection | 22:06:23 |
 Linux Hackerman | https://github.com/Mic92/fast-flake-update is relevant I guess | 23:15:01 |
| 26 Dec 2025 |
| Arian | https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/14715 | 08:33:28 |
 0x4fbb09 it/its ⛯✇ΘΔ | differential updates would be smart here, though it'd depend on how often you update. should be practical to generate diff files between the last week of nixos-unstable and latest | 08:34:04 |
 Emma [it/its] | Git...? | 08:42:56 |
