[Nix-dev] A few questions from a NixOS newbie.

[Matthew Sackman]

On Mon, Apr 21, 2014 at 07:01:02PM +0400, Kirill Elagin wrote:
> 30 seconds just to list available packages. I guess, then files got
> buffered and things become better.
> Well that's comparable to eix except that when you are looking for a
> specific package it is not necessary to go through _all_ of them. That's
> where eix is good (hashes) and nix-env is as slow as when you list all the
> packages.

It's not quite the same, but
echo 'let pkgs = (import <nixpkgs>) {}; in builtins.attrNames pkgs' | nix-instantiate --eval-only -
is rather faster. The values returned you can then use in
nix-env -i -A nixos.pkgs.blah

Matthew