this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2023
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If using flakes you could just for instance add another input. You can also set the input URLs to specific states of the nixpkgs repository by eg referencing specific commits. Then, you should be able to just, e.g., pick Firefox from unstable, another package from the current stable channel, and maybe a broken package from a pull request fixing said package.
If you are not using flakes you can also add system wide channels. IIRC you can then import these channels into your configuration.nix and select packages from the corresponding channels. But here the channels/inputs are not part of configuration itself in contrast to when using flakes.
There's no command to just update all packages without changing the nixos version?
Update your channel & rebuild
Is that the equivalent to
apt updateandapt upgrade? I don't want toapt dist-upgradelolWhen not using flakes,
nixos-rebuild switch --upgradeis equivalent toapt update; apt upgrade. The equivalent todist-upgradeisnix-channel add $NEW-CHANNEL-URL nixosand then performing a regular update.I'm a bit confused about what you actually want? Do you just want to update your packages, but stay on the same NixOS version? Just continue like before. Do you want to stay on your current version, but use some packages from the next version? That should also be possible if you somehow include that channel in your
configuration.nix(though I don't know how this would work in practice).Personally, I just run with
unstablethough, then the releases aren't that important.I think I thought unstable would mean, well, unstable. Like nightly releases or something. Would you use unstable for Firefox?
I think unstable and the fixed versions use the same Firefox package, so you wouldn't gain anything. The difference is rather in libraries that get used and how the distribution does things. For example, the changes listed in https://nixos.org/manual/nixos/stable/release-notes#sec-release-23.11-incompatibilities just appeared mostly one by one for me; one day, I wanted to update my system and got the error that the fonts option got renamed, so I had to change my configuration.
While when using a fixed point release, these changes won't happen. Only when you switch releases. That's what "unstable" refers to.