To avoid the XY problem: I am trying to figure out why my home-manager configuration flake is attempting (and failing) to build zed-editor locally instead of fetching from cache.
I came across nix-diff, which is neat, where it can diff two different derivations, and I found out how to get the derivation for the local package*. The problem is, I can’t find a way to obtain the drv file from the nixos cache to compare to my local drv.
The hydra website has the store path for the program itself and the derivation, but I can’t seem to get the drv file locally, just the built package. I’ve tried nix-store –realise /nix/store/<hash>.drv, but I get cannot build missing derivation. It works for fetching the package itself, and I can use nix-store -q –deriver /nix/store/<hash> to get the same store path, but it still doesn’t fetch it locally. I tried to reproduce locally as well, but as I mentioned before, I am unable to build this configuration on my machine (it runs out of memory).
The github page for nix-diff even mentions using it to evaluate cache misses, but I can’t seem to figure out how to actually do it >,<
* nix path-info ‘.#homeConfigurations.”me@host”.pkgs.zed-editor