From 5f04da905fcd01ea2d68cdbf7af41c836df5bb4e Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Eelco Dolstra Date: Tue, 25 Nov 2014 15:55:28 +0100 Subject: [PATCH] Intro: Mention binary caches --- doc/manual/introduction/about-nix.xml | 13 ++++++++++--- 1 file changed, 10 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-) diff --git a/doc/manual/introduction/about-nix.xml b/doc/manual/introduction/about-nix.xml index 54c18a1e6..56ec39916 100644 --- a/doc/manual/introduction/about-nix.xml +++ b/doc/manual/introduction/about-nix.xml @@ -161,13 +161,19 @@ library and the compiler) would have to built, at least if they are not already in the Nix store. This is a source deployment model. For most users, building from source is not very pleasant as it takes far too long. However, Nix can automatically -skip building from source and download a pre-built binary instead if -it knows about it. Nix channels provide Nix -expressions along with pre-built binaries. +skip building from source and instead use a binary +cache, a web server that provides pre-built binaries. For +instance, when asked to build +/nix/store/b6gvzjyb2pg0…-firefox-33.1 from source, +Nix would first check if the file +http://cache.nixos.org/b6gvzjyb2pg0….narinfo exists, and if +so, fetch the pre-built binary referenced from there; otherwise, it +would fall back to building from source. + Nix Packages collection