Hi!
I have installed firefox by adding it to environment.systemPackages. Now I am trying to install firefox-devedition using nix-env -iA nixos.firefox-devedition-bin (I’m using nix-env for this since I want to eventually use the firefox nightly derivations from the mozilla overlay and don’t want to pollute environment.systemPackages with non-reproducible builds).
As expected this adds a symlink called firefox-devedition to ~/.nix-profile/bin/. However, it also adds a symlink called firefox to ~/.nix-profile/bin. This symlinks goes to /nix/store/c0na6v8n5fp51vgl3fv84vx6rhg094ws-firefox-devedition-bin-unwrapped-62.0b7/bin/firefox.
Now I’ve got two questions:
Why does this happen? My understanding is that nix-env will only symlink the package that I actually tried to install but not its dependencies. However, in this case the firefox-devedition-bin-unwrapped dependency also seems to be symlinked, so my understanding must be wrong.
Firefox wrapper adds unwrapped firefox to propagated-user-env-packages. These are the packages that are automatically installed when you install current one (either via nix-env or systemPackages).
Unfortunately, I can’t come up with an elegant way to opt out without breaking the firefox-devedition.
Thank you @rasendubi! That perfectly explains why firefox ends up in my user environment and at least I have a workaround for installing both versions of firefox side by side.