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profiles/os/nixos: Disable channels

André Breda requested to merge ist189409/nixrnl:remove-nix-channels into master

Description of changes

This MR accomplishes two goals:

  1. Remove the hard-coded root channel in NIX_PATH.
  2. Removing nix-channel and its associated PATH/NIX_PATH modifications;

The first causes a slurry of "Nix search path entry '/nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/root/channels' does not exist, ignoring" warnings when using nix-shell, which this prevents.

The second disables the unused channel facilities. For system management, the flake is used instead. For users, channels are useless: they create symlinks from their AFS homes to the Nix store on the machine where they first add the channel, but this store path is 1) not necessarily present in other machines, 2) even if present, it is not necessarily a GC root in other machines, meaning it can be deleted at any time, 3) the GC may not even be able to access user homes to confirm that the link is still there, leading it to remove it from the GC roots. All in all, they are currently unusable (the same goes for nix profile).

Things done

  • Tested
  • Updated documentation (Wiki/NetBox)
  • Breaking change
Edited by Vasco Guerreiro Vintém Morais

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