https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/commits/nixpkgs-unstable/
There haven’t been any merged updates for five days.
Maybe something’s wrong with the CI/CD?
nixpkgs-unstable was updated two days ago, you can check channel statuses at https://status.nixos.org.
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I mean that the latest commit that got merged into this branch was six days ago.
Actually I’m waiting for a fix for a build failure (PR #490957), but it seems still not got merged into the
nixpkgs-unstablechannel.
Thats why I switched to nixos-unstable. Still not sure about what each branch is for.
But the problem is that I’m waiting this PR for my Mac (aarch64-darwin), and I don’t know whether nixos-unstable is suitable for non-NixOS systems.
The difference is how much of the CI runs for each branch. nixos-* runs various tests that assert NixOS actually boots, and in theory is the slowest-moving of all branches. nixpkgs-* runs a smaller set of tests.
As a darwin user, the -darwin branches should in theory be what you want, but nixos-* shouldn’t hurt; worst case updates take a little longer to test something you don’t care about.
I don’t know why the branch hasn’t moved on, either, if nixos-* has so should nixpkgs-* to my knowledge. Perhaps some particularly gnarly rebuild is happening; you can check https://hydra.nixos.org for details (currently the anti-scraper check just takes too long on my phone, and I’ve lost patience waiting for the page to load).
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Kind of normal.
Assume we have a build time of 3 days. So when 2 days ago the branch was updated, it did so, for what it started to build 3 days before, resulting in an appearing 5 days of age
Well yes, just because the branch advanced 2 days doesn’t mean the commits will be from 2 days ago. That’s just how the channels work.
Switching to nixos-unstable won’t help here (and may hurt if some packages are not cached yet for darwin).
You can just apply the override from that PR to your config, though.
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I found this thread because I was similarly searching for why a PR that had made it to all other channels (including nixos-*) was still missing from nixpkgs-unstable. There might be a problem with darwin builds in the CI pipeline… Hydra is showing an increasing number of jobs stuck in the “queued” state in nixpkgs-unstable starting ~5 days ago. The number of queued jobs increases with each run.
This seems to be unusual; paging back through this page shows that no Hydra job for nixpkgs-unstable has ended with jobs still in the queue in over a year (I only paged back through 2025, so maybe a similar situation happened even earlier).
A quick count of the most recent queued package list for nixpkgs-unstable shows that essentially all of these (>99%) are darwin builds. So whatever’s happening, it seems to only be impacting builds for macOS.
Dropping this here since, as a user, I’m not entirely sure where else to surface this concern.
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These counts are dynamic and update as the job progresses. If you look again (after a period of time) and compare a build number you will see the number of queued jobs falling and the number of successful and failed jobs increasing or staying the same (hopefully for failed builds).
This is why when paging back in time you see no queued jobs remaining. They either succeeded or failed.
For example job 1822949 is now complete.
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Grafana shows the historical time taken for the channels to update.
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The Grafana link is really helpful for contextualizing build times. Thanks!
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I used to watch the Grafana when I’m waiting for a merge, but that got tedious so I wrote a script to watch the branch and notify me with a discord webhook 