| 25 Dec 2025 |
 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 |
| 0x4fbb09 it/its ⛯✇ΘΔ | how much does git like shallow checkouts (and shallow fetches of a shallow repo?)
iirc there are/were performance problems there
(a static file system would also be easier to host) | 09:19:17 |
| Emma [it/its] | git doesnt need any serverside logic beyond a... plain static http server | 09:21:05 |
| tea | true, that's a good idea | 09:25:28 |
| 0x4fbb09 it/its ⛯✇ΘΔ | need, no, but idk how much slower the dumb transport is | 09:27:08 |
| Emma [it/its] | its reasonably fast | 09:27:41 |
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