Similarly to this other topic and another one with more info, I stumbled upon a github issue in which the user was finding several duplicates in their nix-search results. Now, the topics only refer to channel duplication, and appear to have a clue on why it might be. For the original issue opener, I’d suggest reading that second topic and testing along to see what we can find.
However, that part I can’t help with because a) It’s been more than a year since I last had nix search return any result at all, and b) it would probably require messing with nix itself. In the issue I propose a different output for the search results, but I realise that can be hard and finnicky.
If you search for certain packages, you’re bound to find the default and their unwrapped versions. Apparently (or at least in lutris’ case) only the unwrapped version gets a description.
I can’t really test because, as I said, my nix search has been borked since forever, I’d hope something in my config breaks it because recent installs are like this and my config is shared. But I’d like to know if this can be better handled:
- Could we have a description per variant? I mean technically, I wouldn’t be surprised if the way we handle descriptions in derivations meant only the “main” package gets the only associated shortdesc and the rest can’t have one. Lutris has suffix-less,
-freeand-unwrappedentries: maybe they could each have their description include what’s its particularity? Or at least, append to the main desc or something. - Can
nix searchbe taught to, instead of showing-unwrappedvariants as top-level packages (which I know is technically true), just mark the related “wrapped” entry as being wrapped, and hide-unwrapped? I’d guess raw usage of the unwrapped variant is uncommon, and you’d be expected to know what it is before using it, so a mark on the main entry could suffice?
