If you follow the master branch in first-parent fashion, almost everything will have binaries in cache.nixos.org – so I don’t think the tool is really useful for this purpose.
Yeah, thanks for the @. I maintained that in my spare time for a long time, and it worked pretty well. However, life has gotten busy and I’ve not been able to maintain it properly. One option going forward could be fetching the release data from FlakeHub, since it also follows channel updates using infra that is monitored and run by a team instead of an individual. It might make sense for the Nixpkgs repo to push directly in GitHub Actions whenever the channel branches are updated.
By way of update: FlakeHub has a record of all the NixOS 23.05 releases, and roughly 9 months of nixos-unstable releases. That means you can use our new CLI to help bisect. There’s details in our my post, `fh`, the CLI for FlakeHub, but for a quick taste:
I recently found this thread because I wanted to do a git bisect in nixpkgs.
I want to report that I tried --first-parent and it worked well. I ran a git bisect that looked like the following:
$ git bisect start --first-parent
This did successfully only pick merge commits, and at least all the merge commits that I tested were fully cached by Hydra. So this is significantly nicer than doing a bisect without --first-parent. It seems to remove the need to look at channels.nix.gsc.io while doing a bisect and manually pick commits.