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Comment by makebackupstoo | Hacker News Reader

I have yet to see Michael discuss Nix without spreading inaccurate, flatly wrong information about it (Nix does not have post-install hooks, and `nix-env -i` being slow and unrecommended is a known meme that is addressed in upcoming tooling).

Nix fulfills every single requirement Michael has put forward (except the squash>tar thing, which I still don't understand).

That's all there is to this. I sympathize with Ericson's frustration. It's exhausting watching people re-invent inferior solutions to Nix, instead of just hopping in and fixing or using Nix. Of course, John Ericson is one of the few people motivated, qualified (and maybe has the buy-in) to make changes in Nix. I'm thankful for that on-going work.

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>`nix-env -i` being slow and unrecommended is a known meme that is addressed in upcoming tooling

Can you provide more info on that?

It evaluates the build plan for everything we have, and then searches the things that were evaluated.

The new unstable CLI has an evaluation cache at least.

What most people do today is look for keys in the object and just evaluate what they need. (The Nix language is lazily evaluated so you can explore like this pretty well out of the box in the repl.)

Or, they just grep Nixpkgs :D.

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All of this, problems and solutions alike, is a weird situation to be in. I still stand by "just get rid of nix-env -i", but I want there to be better solutions too.

Nixpkgs seems overly complex, and is in some ways, but the fact its trying to herd a gazillion upstream packages that don't meaningfully coordinate makes this harder to fix than it should be.

On a machine which isn't idle:

  $ time nix-env -qa > nixdb.txt
  
  ________________________________________________________
  Executed in  470.40 secs   fish           external
     usr time   25.11 secs   35.00 millis   25.07 secs
     sys time   10.05 secs   27.00 millis   10.02 secs
  
  $ ls -s nixdb.txt
  736 nixdb.txt

A plain-text database of less than 1 MB, which took less than 10 minutes to generate. It is going to remain useful for my use-case ("see if a package is available in Nixpkgs without going to packages.nixos.org"). Now I can just use grep or rg.

Sure, Nix or Nixpkgs could have such (or a better) database native, but I don't see problem with above. Maybe someone cares to explain?

> I'm thankful for that on-going work.

Thank you!

fast, but more typing: `nix-env -iA nixos.packageName`

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