Is one of them ahead of the other one?
Are they diff?
master is the branch that most changes get merged to directly. nixos-unstable is a channel, also marked as a branch in git, and it follows somewhat later. I think it’s well explained on Nix channels - NixOS Wiki
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Can I add master channel to my repos?
How often master updates are moved to unstable?
And how can I add a 3rd party git channel to my nix system? (e.g.: I made an update to a derivation and want to use it asap, and I also hate flakes 
)
My problem is this, isn’t clear.
What is that nixpkgs vscode imported in nix file? It’s a folder containing vscode.nix? Is it all nixpkgs forked from master or sth else?
- From the linked wiki page:
Updates for the -unstable channels typically take a few days after commits land in the master branch.
- You could override nixpkgs path to a local git repository, see: A local repository instead of a Nix channel - #3 by raindev
The text above the code sample describes what is there…
My approach to that is to use ‘git worktree’ to check out a copy of the nixpkgs collection to ~/nixpkgs-foo.
where, for this example, ‘foo’ == vscode
It’s a checkout of the nixpkgs tree. The idea is to have some differences - local edits, or maybe just an older or newer version for whatever reason - and pull specific elements from the pkgs attrset in that collection.
An approach like this is also used sometimes to pull specific packages from nixos-unstable when the main system is on a release branch. It doesn’t always work, but when the divergence is small it can be fine.