idea: nix-collect-garbage "--delete-only-substitutable"

[dtzWill]

Basically, it'd be neat to make it easy to collect builds that are already available via substituters (and not reference locally, hence nix-collect-garbage). I suppose what I'm really looking for is "--dont-delete-if-not-available-anywhere-else-yet" and the use case is on my builders so I can free up space without losing build progress for things not yet uploaded.

Flag name may need to be improved :).

Thoughts? Opinions?

[lheckemann]

As an approximation, you could delete things by signature. Probably more efficient than querying the substituter for every one of your paths.

[danbst]

I'd vote for this to be default, and explicit flag to force GC those.

On other hand, typical NixOS build produces small unique derivations (for each unique configuration file). These are not worth saving. So some parameter "save derivations, which take more than x seconds to rebuild and are not availble in binary caches" =)

[lheckemann]

That last suggestion depends on #1710.

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[stale]

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