| 25 Dec 2025 |
 EsperLily [she/her] | that's actually a good question, i have it set up as an extra substituter in my configuration but i don't remember why | 04:31:56 |
| EsperLily [she/her] | was it recommended at one point to use past installation? | 04:32:11 |
 raitobezarius | The installer automatically put it | 04:33:16 |
| EsperLily [she/her] | no i added it to my nix-darwin configuration, in a commit 19 months ago that just says "Add cache settings for cache.lix.systems" | 04:34:18 |
| EsperLily [she/her] | i'm deleting it now of course, but i don't know why i added it in the first place, and searching for it in the current docs just shows it as part of an installer invocation. perhaps 19 months ago there was a different recommendation | 04:36:41 |
| raitobezarius | We definitely had it recommended in the very first days and it was a bad idea given we never populated it meaningfully with cached nightly builds | 04:37:53 |
| EsperLily [she/her] | alright that would explain it then, since i switched during the early days | 04:38:05 |
|  flacks changed their display name from flax to flacks. | 08:42:59 |
|  pentane (DECT CYPT/2978) changed their display name from pentane ⭔ to pentane (DECT CYPT/2978). | 11:23:34 |
|  Nicole/Drezil 🏳️⚧️ (she/her) changed their profile picture. | 13:08:40 |
 Sofie 🏳️⚧️ (she/her) | https://nesbitt.io/2025/12/24/package-managers-keep-using-git-as-a-database.html | 15:19:55 |
 K900 | Except nixpkgs also exists as snapshot tarballs that we host ourselves? | 15:28:04 |
| K900 | Like, "nixpkgs is giving github issues" is a "nixpkgs is a big repo" problem | 15:28:13 |
| K900 | Not a "nixpkgs uses git" problem | 15:28:17 |
 Lotte (it/its)/Cinny (she/her) | git handles big repos more poorly than they need to be
although nixpkgs still needs a significant amount of the repo checked out to function i think
| 15:35:06 |
 KFears (they/them) | Nixpkgs is given as an example of a big tepo that is also kind of a package registry | 15:35:14 |
| KFears (they/them) | Not as an example of the fully traditional package registry | 15:35:25 |
| KFears (they/them) | Point here being is that if you push enough shit into git, it will fall apart | 15:35:44 |
| Lotte (it/its)/Cinny (she/her) | if IFD was cheap i think nixpkgs could be way lighter than a git repo checkout or a tarball | 15:39:45 |
| K900 | Git is fine at nixpkgs scale honestly | 16:22:25 |
| K900 | Github on the other hand | 16:22:32 |
 piegames | I think that post is less relevant for Nixpkgs itself and more for whatever comes after Flakes | 17:08:33 |
 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 |
