How to tell nix to find a prebuilt (even older) version of package instead of compiling locally?

myguidingstar · April 23, 2020, 5:17pm

I’ve just update my nixos from 19.09 to 20.03
Everything works as expected except graalvm. Somehow it doesn’t pull the built version from cache.nixos.org but compile from source it stead. And that package is massive, my computer can’t afford compiling it.
Any idea why and how to fix that?

myguidingstar · April 23, 2020, 5:43pm

ah, found out what happened with graalvm here:

github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs

graalvm8: upgrade to 20.0.0

opened 01:56PM - 21 Mar 20 UTC

closed 09:48AM - 05 Nov 20 UTC

bennyandresen

## Issue description I would like to request a package upgrade to it. https:…//github.com/graalvm/graalvm-ce-builds/releases/tag/vm-20.0.0 My system is choking trying to compile it, so I didn't even attempt to update it. Additional question: Maybe a graalvm8-ce could be introduced based on the ce-builds above? Would that be accepted? That way one can test graalvm without the large and long compilation process. I'm willing to work on that. @hlolli @volth

I have another question, however: how do I tell nix to use a prebuilt version, even when it’s older, in such situation?

myguidingstar · April 23, 2020, 5:51pm

just updated the thread title to my latest question

theotherjimmy · April 24, 2020, 3:02pm

I don’t think you can tell nix to do this, as the hash would be different. Nix only knows about packages and their hashes; It’s pretty version oblivious.