bug: home-manager fails to activate when .drvs are not present in the nix-store

[tnichols217]

Are you following the right branch?

• My Nixpkgs and Home Manager versions are in sync

Is there an existing issue for this?

• I have searched the existing issues

Issue description

Home-manager will fail to activate when specific .drvs are unavailable (due to a limitation in nix-env). This limitation is however not present in the new nix profile. I have attempted to force home-manager to use nix profile to circumvent this issue, but is proving difficult with all the checks home-manager places on the fs. I would like a way to force (through a module option) home-manager to use nix profile instead of nix-env, as well all of the rest of my system being on flakes.

https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/blob/master/modules/home-environment.nix#L600

Here, the only check to decide whether to use nix profile or nix-env is simply whether "${cfg.profileDirectory}/manifest.json" exists, but I feel like this is a very rudimentary way of choosing whether to use nix profile or nix-env. Simply touching that file so that home-manager will be happy also does not work as the profile will fail to change.

Like I said, I would prefer to have a module option to specify usage of nix profile vs nix-env, with the default option to keep the current behavior (as to reduce impact on unaffected systems). I would be happy to contribute once I familiarize myself with the structure of home manager. Feedback on a solution is also welcome!

Maintainer CC

No response

System information

- system: `"x86_64-linux"`
- host os: `Linux 6.7.0-zen3, NixOS, 24.05 (Uakari), 24.05.20240117.842d9d8`
- multi-user?: `yes`
- sandbox: `yes`
- version: `nix-env (Nix) 2.18.1`
- channels(root): `"nixos"`
- nixpkgs: `/nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/root/channels/nixos`

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