forever (code >>= test >>= deploy)Copyright 2014–2024 Bryan Gardiner.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License⤴.
nvd is a tool for diffing the versions of all store paths in the closures of
two Nix store paths, neatly summarizing the differences. This is mainly
intended for comparing two system configurations and is inspired by the output
of emerge -pv from Gentoo's Portage package manager.
nvd could also be likened to the output of
Debian's apt upgrade -V, or any equivalent from other
distributions' package managers. nvd isn't limited to comparing system
configurations though, and can work with any two store paths.
I wrote nvd as a way to see what is changing on my systems when I run
nixos-rebuild. Package rebuilds usually aren't important to me, but I
need to know when versions change. Usually I care most about packages
that are included in environment.systemPackages, so packages in
this list are highlighted and coloured specially and changes to this list are
reported.
I recommend wrapping your usual nixos-rebuild call in a script
that compares the result to the current system:
nixos-rebuild build "$@" && nvd diff /run/current-system result
Here is an example session. We can see that Nixpkgs updates have been pulled
in, bringing in various package updates. Firefox and cpupower have been
installed explicitly in systemPackages, and bpytop
has been newly added to the list:
$ nvd diff /nix/var/nix/profiles/system-{14,15}-link
<<< /nix/var/nix/profiles/system-14-link
>>> /nix/var/nix/profiles/system-15-link
Version changes:
[U*] #1 cpupower 5.4.87 -> 5.4.88
[U*] #2 firefox 84.0.1 -> 84.0.2
[U.] #3 firefox-unwrapped 84.0.1 -> 84.0.2
[U.] #4 initrd-linux 5.4.87 -> 5.4.88
[U.] #5 linux 5.4.87 -> 5.4.88
[U.] #6 nixos-system-unnamed 20.09.git.6ad5c94ed93 -> 20.09.git.9bf1626e7bb
[U.] #7 system76-acpi-module 1.0.1-5.4.87 -> 1.0.1-5.4.88
[U.] #8 system76-io-module 1.0.1-5.4.87 -> 1.0.1-5.4.88
[U.] #9 x86_energy_perf_policy 5.4.87 -> 5.4.88
Added packages:
[A+] #1 bpytop 1.0.50
Closure size: 2205 -> 2206 (38 paths added, 37 paths removed, delta +1).
On or shortly after October 19, 2024, nvd will move from Gitlab to Sourcehut. Please update your links accordingly.
2024-09-29: nvd 0.2.4 released, Sourcehut migration in progress.
2024-04-28: Fool me twice (moving to Sourcehut).
The recommended way to obtain nvd is through Nixpkgs, where it has the
attribute name nvd.
nvd is hosted on GitLab: project page⤴, issue tracker⤴. Clone the source from one of:
nvd is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0.
forever (code >>= test >>= deploy)