Question for the smarter #Nix and #NixOS people: is there an easy way to pin a package to a specific version? All I want to do is downgrade hugo from v0.124 to v0.123.8.
Right now I've got like a dozen tabs open with a bunch of convoluted answers involving overrides and custom builds. The most "straightforward" method I've seen so far is using builtins.fetchGit to reference a specific commit, but it's apparently cloning the entire nixpkgs repo, which seems excessive. Any suggestions? Thanks in advance!
@aires fetching an old version nixpkgs repo works -- remember that it's lazy and not eager so even though you're fetching the entire repo you are only evaluating the stuff you need.
@astrid@aires This. For the case of pinning a version, this should absolutely be the way to go.
Overrides can work just as well, but as software develops, so does its dependencies, possibly build approach, etc - meaning not all version-pinning overrides are going to be simple.
That's where prior nixpkgs versions come with guarantees and the intent is clearly declared in your config.
@aires To find this stuff, i usually use search.nixos.org, and then click on the source to go to the github url for the derivation, then git blame the version line to find a nixpkgs rev that gets the job done. An overlay though is the only way to keep the single package pinned while the rest of the repo is current
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