[Nix-dev] Re: FOSDEM 2008 meeting

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi,

ludo at gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès) writes:

> "nix-env -i" is indeed surprisingly slow---"surprisingly" because other
> operations like `nix-build' don't seem to take that long...

Wild guess: "nix-env -i" has to read the *whole* Nix expression to get
the `name' attributes (e.g., `all-packages.nix' plus all imported Nix
expressions), while "nix-env -Ai" could in theory just read
`all-packages.nix' and only lazily read the required imported Nix
expressions.

Does it make sense?

Thanks,
Ludovic.