On a machine which isn't idle: $ time nix-env -qa > nixdb.txt ________________________________________________________ Executed in 470.40 secs fish

On a machine which isn't idle: $ time nix-env -qa > nixdb.txt ________________________________________________________ Executed in 470.40 secs fish external usr time 25.11 secs 35.00 millis 25.07 secs sys time 10.05 secs 27.00 millis 10.02 secs $ ls -s nixdb.txt 736 nixdb.txt A plain-text database of less than 1 MB, which took less than 10 minutes to generate. It is going to remain useful for my use-case ("see if a package is available in Nixpkgs without going to packages.nixos.org"). Now I can just use grep or rg. Sure, Nix or Nixpkgs could have such (or a better) database native, but I don't see problem with above. Maybe someone cares to explain?