How do I prevent the 5+ hour spontaneous builds for firefox and chromium and just install it regularly through nixpkgs.
The wrapped firefox package is just firefox but if the unwrapped package isn’t in the cache, the wrapped won’t be either.
What nixpkgs branch are you on? Release branches have better odds of packages being in cache than unstable, small branches or straight up git.
I just had firefox and chromium in environment.systemPackages and frequently run nix-collect-garbage -d, nix store gc, and nix store optimise
nix-channel --list
nixos https://channels.nixos.org/nixos-unstable-small
nixpkgs https://channels.nixos.org/nixpkgs-unstable
also the the wrapped firefox package must not be just firefox, as it’s building something with over 50k steps in nixos-rebuild when the largest packages in my configuration.nix are firefox and chromium
You can search https://hydra.nixos.org/project/nixos for the package in the respective jobset to find out why it’s not in the cache.
By release branch I mean something like nixos-25.05 if you are on linux. They are only updated when pretty large package set has been build so you will find more packages in the cache right after the update. Since you are on a small branch, when you rebuild after an update, you will find many packages still missing. Small is good for servers because you can get security updates faster.
Wait so how does nixos-25.05-darwin work - does it have updates to packages with releases after (may 2025) or is this a benchmark to archive nix builds from May 2025 for those to no longer be updated
also I feel my question hasn’t been answered - there’s a wrapped version of every other package in nixpkgs-unstable why is firefox forcing a build from source on every update that’s insanely dumb and inefficient.
I have only firefox and chromium in configuration.nix yet “chromium-unwrapped” and “firefox-unwrapped” appear in /nix/store
this should be behavior banned in nix, not enabled by default
how do I install the actual package like in every other sane operating system
What do you think wrapped means? It’s just the -unwrapped bin called from a wrapper script with a few dependencies set as env variables. The wrapped package depends on the unwrapped package.
Nix will build packages from source when they are not in the cache (yet). The small branches are updating faster so fewer packages are in the cache after the update.
I’d believed wrapped meant (at minimum) that I didn’t have to build it on my own system. I thought it was built on nix servers or something at time of being added to the nixpkgs server archive.
If you’re using the stable or unstable channel, in any normal circumstance firefox or chromium will not be built from source. The “unwrapped” packages are just an implementation detail, you shouldn’t mind them.
If you’re using the -small channels, though, it’s likely that the packages are not available in the cache yet. The point of the small channels is in fact to be updated as quickly as possible, without waiting for the build farm to complete those 5hr+ long builds like firefox and chromium.
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what is this then; this is the core of the problem(nixos-rebuild switch --upgrade-all output):
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Stop using the small channel. That’s not a guaranteed solution to never having packages build locally but it will happen a lot less often.
1 Like
The core of the problem is using the small channel if your machine dependes on graphical packages like firefox or chromium. These channels are meant to be used for headless machines that needs to be updated quickly.
1 Like
what does the small channel do - I thought it would just minimize hard disk usage
- Small channels, such as
nixos-25.05-smallornixos-unstable-small. These are identical to the stable and unstable channels described above, except that they contain fewer binary packages. This means they get updated faster than the regular channels (for instance, when a critical security patch is committed to NixOS’s source tree), but may require more packages to be built from source than usual. They’re mostly intended for server environments and as such contain few GUI applications.
2 Likes
Okay I just switched to nixos-unstable (not nixos-unstable-small) with firefox and chromium in configuration.nix and it completed the nixos-rebuild switch --upgrade-all much faster, without any attempt at building firefox or chromium. I believe switching the nixos channel was the solution.
Any further insight from @truh, @rnhmjoj, or anyone knowledgeable on the matter about exactly what about nixos-unstable-small (i.e. exactly which discluded packages) forced the browsers to build from source would be appreciated still.
Somebody has to build the browser and small is updating without the browser being built.
so it’s not definitely because of explicitly discluded packages in nixos-unstable-small being not found by nixos-rebuild and making firefox/chromium build from source