Context
I was refactoring a NixOS configuration of a machine with better designed NixOS modules. It was not supposed to change anything in the final configuration, or so I thought.
After the refactoring, while deploying a machine with NixOps, I noticed that some derivations were build and deployed. Since I thought my refactoring did not change the configuration of the machine, I was surprised to see anything being build.
After investigation, I noticed that my refactoring changed the order of the elements listed in environment.systemPackages.
Question
How relevant is the order of elements in environment.systemPackages for the final configuration of the machine?
I might be unaware of some internal implementation details, but the only potential impact that you’ll have in practice is; if there’s different package providing the same files, the order with which they were specified can influence from which package those files are linked.
For example, if you add both nodejs_18 and nodejs_20, only one can be executed when you run node in your terminal. I believe it’s the first one, at least that’s the result I get when creating a shell environment. I tried building a NixOS VM image to be certain, but didn’t manage to.
Anyway, as long as you don’t have that, it probably won’t make a difference, though it’s hard to check. I tried it out with a dev shell, and the generated file does actually change, so even with nix hash path, you see that the output is technically different, even though the observable result stays the same.
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