| 2 Apr 2025 |
 fzakaria | I asked this on twitter but maybe here is a better place.
On my MacOS Nix installation (2.26) I'm surprised in my flake project how often I hit:
unpacking 'github:NixOS/nixpkgs/b7ba7f9f45c5cd0d8625e9e217c28f8eb6a19a76' into the Git cache.
| 22:55:51 |
| fzakaria | Is this a bug in Nix or something I'm missing. | 22:56:04 |
| 3 Apr 2025 |
 John Ericson | * so we are not in this same position come november | 03:12:00 |
|  mjolnir banned  @cafkafk:fem.gg (<no reason supplied>). | 11:41:55 |
 Mic92 | fzakaria: what do you mean by often? is this for the same commit? | 12:16:39 |
| Mic92 | I can also recommend: nixpkgs.url = "git+https://github.com/Mic92/nixpkgs?shallow=1&ref=main"; | 12:17:10 |
|  @2xsaiko:tchncs.de changed their display name from 2xsaiko to 2xsaiko (moved! @saiko:knifepoint.net). | 12:52:04 |
 teto | does the shallow do anything ? I would suspect it's the default | 17:50:38 |
 emily | GitHub really doesn't like people doing shallow clones of the same repo repeatedly, fwiw. (they've had other package managers change their update mechanism because of that in the past) | 19:22:16 |
 jade_ | i would never recommend this over a tarball input. if it's a nix bug, nix should fix it. | 20:44:34 |
| jade_ | * i would never recommend this over a tarball input. if it's a nix bug, nix should fix it. git clone is very slow and resource intensive compared to a tarball fetch such as the github: flake URL scheme. | 20:45:00 |
| 4 Apr 2025 |
|  redrield joined the room. | 00:17:02 |
| mjolnir unbanned @cafkafk:fem.gg. | 06:12:58 |
| Mic92 | Shallow clones are significantly faster for me than downloading tarballs and it's not slower than downloading tarballs for an initial clone. | 10:56:02 |
| Mic92 | * Shallow clones when updating are significantly faster for me than downloading tarballs and it's not slower than downloading tarballs for an initial clone. | 10:56:14 |
| Mic92 | No it's not the default because git inputs have a revcount flag that cannot be computed when doing a shallow clone. | 10:58:58 |
| teto | do you know a reference talking about this : is it a CPU vs bandwidth tradeoff (shallow clones being more CPU intensive) ? | 11:01:14 |
| teto | is revcount that useful ? I never used that I think | 11:01:38 |
| Mic92 | Github uses them in their official checkout action ... | 11:01:49 |
| Mic92 | Agreed but removing it would change evaluation of existing flake.locks | 11:02:31 |
| emily | I think it was CocoaPods or Homebrew or both | 11:19:42 |
| emily | I believe serving shallow clones is expensive, I guess because it is the CPU cost of the Git protocol without the network savings? | 11:19:59 |
| emily | I think they prefer a permanent non-shallow clone that gets fetched normally, or tarball downloads | 11:20:14 |
| Mic92 | Ok. but why is there CI not downloading tarballs? | 13:02:59 |
| emily | no idea :) but I guess CI probably runs a lot less than people hit package indexes | 13:06:03 |
| Mic92 | I think it also makes a big difference if you just do this for nixpkgs instead of many small repos | 13:06:34 |
| Mic92 | Which I think is what CocoaPods is doing | 13:07:11 |
 Alyssa Ross | CocoaPods at the time was one big repo | 13:08:06 |
| Alyssa Ross | I'd imagine it's a lot more expensive with one big repo than with many small ones | 13:08:30 |
| Alyssa Ross | https://blog.cocoapods.org/Master-Spec-Repo-Rate-Limiting-Post-Mortem/ | 13:08:59 |
