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nixos programs.sqlite missing large numbers of packages #45

@benwbooth

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@benwbooth

I'm writing a custom bash command_not_found_handle that does a lookup into /nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/root/channels/nixos/programs.sqlite to find out which nix package to install for a given program. This is a sqlite database that's generated on the nixos cache servers, and is distributed via the nixos channel.

I'm noticing that a lot of very commonly used programs are missing from both the unstable nixos and the 20.09 nixos versions. For example, the "vim" binary is not found. Looking at the 20.03 version, I can find vim, but the record count in the programs table seems suspiciously low, around ~40,000 program records for all recent versions of programs.sqlite. The nix package database at search.nixos.org claims to have over ~80,000 packages so I would expect at least 80,000 records or more in the programs table.

I noticed a similar issue cropping up with nix-index: nix-community/nix-index#163

In the case of nix-index, it looks like there are mal-formed JSON records being generated at cache.nixos.org, which is causing nix-index to skip the creation of records for many popular packages, such as vim and emacs. I'm not sure if this is the same problem afflicting programs.sqlite, but it may be a possibility.

Is this the right issue tracker for this problem, or is there a more appropriate place to put this? It looks like the cache.nixos.org server scripts that generate JSON files need to be fixed.

Thanks!

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