prism-sync

prism-sync is the background maintenance utility for the Prism package management system. Its sole responsibility is to build and maintain a local "package database." This database allows prism-install to provide near-instantaneous fuzzy search results without needing to query the internet or the vast Nixpkgs tree in real-time.

How it works

1. Cache Preparation: It ensures the directory ~/.cache/prism exists.
2. Package Indexing: It runs nix-env -qaP --description.
   • -q (Query): Looks for packages.
   • -a (Available): Looks for what can be installed, not just what is installed.
   • -P (Path): Includes the attribute path (e.g., nixpkgs.firefox instead of just firefox).
   • --description: Fetches the brief summary of each package.
3. Sanitization: It uses grep to filter out nixos. attribute paths. These are often internal modules or configuration functions rather than installable binaries, and attempting to index them can cause the script to error out.
4. Storage: The final output is saved to ~/.cache/prism/pkglist.txt, which serves as the "source of truth" for the prism-install UI.

Dependencies

• nix: The primary tool used to query the repository.
• coreutils: For directory management (mkdir) and line counting (wc).

Usage

This script is typically run automatically by prism-install if the cache is missing, but can be run manually to refresh the list after a Nix channel update.

prism-sync