On Thursday I updated my laptop and it started building Firefox because the binary wasn’t available on cache.nixos.org, today I updated my desktop and it’s manually building a bunch of qt packages.
Both machines are on 24.05. It’s not the first time this has happened. Both are using flakes with nixpkgs.url = "github:nixos/nixpkgs/release-24.05";
Other than stopping the update and trying again later is there any way to avoid building packages manually? It feels like the deployment process is backwards: packages updates are deployed to nixpkgs master quite a while before the binary is available on cache.nixos.org
You should use nixos-24.05 – the channel branch that is updated when Hydra is finished building a channel bump – not release-24.05, which commits go into directly.
Similarly, you should use nixos-unstable rather than master.
aha, thanks! That explains why I’m encountering this frequently!
edit: I think I realise how I ended up here, home-manager does use release-24.05 as the branch you need to use and I got a notice about them needing to match previously (I’d probably tested nixos-unstable) so set it to release-24.05 to match home-manager.