I apologize for completely unrelated comment in the thread, but could you elaborate on what you mean? This sounds interesting.
Most likely, he’s using something like https://github.com/nmattia/niv or flakes. And selects different packages from different points in time.
No, nothing but mainline Nix/Nixpkgs (it is a pretty old construction, too).
I have some system packages, and then I have a ton of buildEnvs written, and then also some linkFarms.
These buildEnvs are in my $PATH. And I have a script that is similar to nix-shell but older and also allows manipulating $LD_LIBRARY_PATH in addition to $PATH and $NIX_CFLAGS etc., so some of the linkFarms just serve as its cache/index.
Then typically I rebuid all of these from master, sometimes something doesn’t build (like ffmpegFull right now) and then the corresponding shard stays behind for some time, and if something breaks too badly I might checkout an older revision and rebuild one shard.
Sometimes I rebuild just one shard I care about, like in the case I try to find out which TeXLive packages I need to add to compile a file my coauthor has edited.
(The shard-building part is online on GitHub)
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