This is mostly true, but the most important and vital part of the Nixpkgs infrastructure in my opinion is tarballs.nixos.org which hosts the tarballs for source code that has gone missing. Before nix build even touches the real internet to get the source code for derivations in Nixpkgs, it talks to tarballs.nixos.org. Thankfully, as I found out via Marsnix, the sources (inputs) are only 400~GB for a given revision of Nixpkgs, and there is tons of overlap between Nixpkgs versions. It should be easier to host this yourself, and I’d love to provide a mechanism. Imagine services.nix-mirror = { enable = true; revisions = [ "nixos-23.05" inputs.nixpkgs.rev ]; tarballs = true; outputs = false; }, but I have very little time to work on these things, since I’m getting paid to work on other problems instead of this one.
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