I have mixed feelings about this change. My intention with this image has always been to provide the smallest possible working nix installation. An image that's particularly well suited for, say, interactive shell use I'd rather define separately on top of this one.

Apparently there are 2 glibc's in the closure, one of which comes from this installed bash and another from the installed Nix. I'll try to figure out how both can use the same glibc to decrease closure size.

I was able to minimize closure size from 161MB to 149MB, while adding bash at no extra cost :)

This is done by:

• Using keep-derivations = false
• Reinstalling Nix and cacert from the available channel to share dependencies with other things installed from the channel

See commits for more details

After thinking about it some more, what you suggested sounds fine to me. I removed all but the first commit which minimizes the closure a bit more.

Ping?

Sorry for being unresponsive. I have a bad cold and can't do much productive work at the moment. Give me another day or two, please, then I'll revisit this PR!

With the work in #31 (which was upstreamed to nixos/nix) I think this PR becomes obsolete.

We can look at the closure size of nixos/nix docker image as we would for any other nix derivation. But since we are using multi layered image I'm not sure the size matters as much as it did before.