A few days ago, I proposed importing from a derivation <https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/11319#issuecomment-167144900> to save us from having to manually manage autogenerated firefox/thunderbird fixed-output derivaiton hash files and junk up the nixpkgs repository with them. In response, Vladimír Čunát pointed out that nix-env would currently force a download at evaluation time as a result of that change, and that's undesirable.
I see it as inevitable that we'll have to start importing from derivations to make external package ecosystems more manageable. Currently, haskellPackages is already eating up a large chunk of the overall repository size, and as we start adopting similar automated processes to manage other ecosystems, I see no way to keep the repo size manageable. It also feels like a bit of an abuse of a VCS to be putting autogenerated files in it, as we do today. Especially when nix is generally so good at doing that sort of thing for us. It seems like the main obstacle standing in the way of this pattern is nix-env, given its habit (also unsustainable) of forcing the evaluation of a large chunk of the packages expression. People have expressed a desire to deprecate that sort of functionality, but I don't know what sort of timeline such a change could be made on, so I'm looking for ways to make it more manageable in the meantime. Does anyone have ideas on how to improve this? Or am I wrong about things getting out of control if we don't? Are there other options? Thanks, Dan
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