| 29 Nov 2025 |
 hab25 | Not only would this help users by eliminating the possibility of them making a bad choice, it would likely also lower maintenance efforts by getting rid of a branch (a large one, at that) | 16:54:06 |
 K900 | The "small" channels aren't a separate small subset of nixpkgs | 16:54:28 |
| K900 | And no, we can't drop the stable branches | 16:54:43 |
| K900 | People are relying on those | 16:54:48 |
| hab25 | the wiki I just linked says "a defined set of commonly-used packages" | 16:55:16 |
| K900 | And no, you can't generally mix random channels together and expect things to work, never mind be "more stable" than either channel by itself | 16:55:29 |
| K900 | The wiki is full of shit, as it often is | 16:55:36 |
 Grimmauld (any/all) | well, yes, but the derivations are exactly the same as in big channels, they aren't built twice like stable/unstable are built seperately | 16:55:55 |
| Grimmauld (any/all) | its not technically wrong, but it is misleading | 16:56:06 |
| Grimmauld (any/all) | And mixing channels is a very bad idea. For some pieces of software it works. But it gets notoriously finicky e.g. with graphics drivers being mismatched just to name one example | 16:57:59 |
| hab25 | Thanks, that makes sense | 16:58:57 |
| Grimmauld (any/all) | like, i can run firefox from stable 25.05 on unstable, but it doesn't have hardware accel. It is to be expected the other way round breaks similarly. I wouldn't call that stable and production ready. | 16:59:03 |
| K900 | I would add that the "stable base + unstable packages" setup would still have to be maintained | 16:59:33 |
| K900 | If we want it to be a thing we recommend to people | 16:59:39 |
| K900 | So there would need to be testing of it, etc, and at this point you've just reinvented the stable branch but more pain | 17:00:00 |
| Grimmauld (any/all) | this, and drawing a line becomes incredibly hard. | 17:00:07 |
| hab25 | I learned a lot, thank you all | 17:01:28 |
| Grimmauld (any/all) | Like, is muttersomething you'd pull from unstable? it has only 25 reverse dependencies. But you can't update mutter without updating glib, and glib is a mass rebuild. Would glib be from stable? Would that mean mutter needs to come from stable too? | 17:01:37 |
| Grimmauld (any/all) | it just doesn't work | 17:01:42 |
| Grimmauld (any/all) | i'd be on board with renaming unstable -> rolling, but thats about it. | 17:02:46 |
| hab25 | I'm thinking I'll prefer nixos-unstable then. I expect it won't cause me too much trouble given properly-locked nix makes things so easy to rollback | 17:05:04 |
 hexa | so staging -> stumbling -> rolling | 17:05:19 |
| hexa | * so staging -> stumbling -> rolling | 17:05:23 |
| K900 | Generally I'd argue that nixos-unstable should be your "default choice" | 17:06:08 |
| Grimmauld (any/all) | i wish we had humorous people calling channels that | 17:06:08 |
| K900 | And you should only run stable branches if you know exactly why you're doing that | 17:06:25 |
| Grimmauld (any/all) | i'd argue it depends on whether you want to be confronted with all the breaks one at a time or all at once | 17:06:37 |
| Grimmauld (any/all) | and obviously if you contribute, then you contribute the things you yourself want to use so you probably are on unstable (or even master) to get stuff faster | 17:07:28 |
| K900 | I strongly believe that people who say they want to be confronted with all the breaks at once actually mean they want to be confronted with all the breaks never | 17:07:37 |
| K900 | And that's only valid if you can dispose of the system after it runs out of support time | 17:08:04 |
