Future of channels and channels.nixos.org in a Flakes world?

[cdepillabout]

@lilyball

Of course, given all that, it makes me wonder why the default flake registry doesn’t specify a branch for nixpkgs , thus having it default to master .

I thought this was strange as well. This inspired me to write:

How to pin nix registry nixpkgs to release channel

I had trouble working out how to pin the nixpkgs registry entry to a release channel. I’m posting it here in case anyone else finds it helpful. On my system, I want the nixpkgs flake to refer to the nixos-21.05 channel (flake url: github:NixOS/nixpkgs/nixos-21.05). But I want this channel to be pinned to a known commit. I want to be able to update this manually. In order to achieve this, I use the following steps: Starting off, I don’t have any user registry entries: $ nix registry list…