 | Nix Hackers | 848 Members |
| For people hacking on the Nix package manager itself | 186 Servers |
| Nix Hackers | 848 Members |
| For people hacking on the Nix package manager itself | 186 Servers |
| Sender | Message | Time |
|---|---|---|
| 1 Jul 2025 | ||
 roberth | yea | 11:42:19 |
 magic_rb | If its blake2 cant we sha256 hash the blake2 hash, or is that a horrible idea | 11:42:45 |
| roberth | Probably a symlink to a synthetic .git/annex directory is preferable | 11:42:52 |
| magic_rb | In reply to @roberthensing:matrix.orgId say that each annexed object should be a separate store path | 11:43:15 |
| magic_rb | You dont want to be copying 40GB every time a single image changes | 11:43:25 |
| roberth | True, but we shouldn't be copying those store paths in the first place | 11:43:50 |
| roberth | And if we do, they should match the non-Nix layouts | 11:44:02 |
| roberth | Currently there's not much of a connection between libfetchers fetchers and the store layer, so putting it in the store is more complicated than putting it in .git/annex, fwiw | 11:44:27 |
| magic_rb | Wait so we just tell nix to include .git/annex during eval? | 11:44:57 |
| roberth | (copying to the store only happens at the end of fetchTree and not within the individual source accessors) | 11:45:02 |
| magic_rb | Okay im lost lol | 11:45:17 |
| magic_rb | We do have to copy for a build still no? | 11:45:50 |
| roberth | So we have the sources accessor objects that behave like very simple virtual file systems, and we plan to use them directly instead of copying everything to the store all the time | 11:46:11 |
| roberth | They can implement operations like readDirectory or readFile as they please, so the git accessor with annex enabled could add a .git and .git/annex to what it returns, and then do whatever is necessary to return the contents of that | 11:47:31 |
| roberth | Yes, but only the things you bring into the derivation. You could use a source filter to avoid some unneeded stuff. Currently that's all moot because fetchTree copies everything it could return, but we'll change that, and make source filtering a solution for this problem. | 11:49:19 |
| magic_rb | In reply to @roberthensing:matrix.orgRight which is why im saying that i think each annexed file should become its own store path, so that youre not copying about 40GB for each build | 11:50:14 |
| roberth | If it's not clear which is better, we could make this behavior configurable. Making the right parts of .git/annex available to derivations would be a pain. | 11:50:38 |
| magic_rb | Say im working on a game, then to nix build it, i need essentially all the annexed files, so the for every build im copying all the assets which can be arbitrarily huge | 11:51:13 |
| roberth | That's designing for the current Nix, not the Nix we're promising, fwiw | 11:51:33 |
| magic_rb | Even with lazy tree, if im using 40GB, i have to copy 40GB every time no? | 11:52:15 |
| magic_rb | Thats how i understood it | 11:52:25 |
| roberth | So I guess we have three possible behaviors:
| 11:53:59 |
| roberth | Only if you dereference every annexed file | 11:54:31 |
| roberth | To make fetching the annexed files lazy involves:
| 11:58:34 |
 emily | if the build of a game requires processing every source asset – which I believe is normal – then this does not stop copying every asset anew for every build, even if lazy trees were fully implemented, right? | 11:59:20 |
| emily | (maybe you can cut down on it if you can split it into one asset build per derivation since the store paths would remain the same if the individual asset doesn't change?) | 11:59:55 |
| emily | (and I guess integration could avoid re-hashing the file to determine that?) | 12:00:03 |
| emily | just checking I understand correctly that if all the assets are needed in the same derivation as part of a src = ./.; type thing it would still amount to copying the entire thing every time | 12:00:24 |
| magic_rb | Yeah this is what im saying. Say youre building a godot game, you end up with src = ./., you cant do much with uh, whats was it filterTree | 12:03:33 |
| roberth | The store references choice does make that easier to achieve. Otherwise, we're looking representations of store objects that don't reside in a real filesystem but in a FUSE store, and an underlying ca-store like tvix/snix. That would be great to have, but it's a lot of work | 12:03:44 |