nix-darwin reinstalls masApps upon every darwin-rebuild switch command

[ceeeeej]

I am running nix-darwin with home-manager. I updated my flake via nix flake update and now I am observing that home-manager appears to be re-installing all of the masApps listed in my brew.nix file now when I run the darwin-rebuild switch command.

The previous behavior was that already installed MAS applications would not be re-installed upon each darwin-rebuild switch command.

Running darwin-version returns 25.05.ae406c0

[emilazy]

Hmm, that’s strange. Do you have the previous commit hash from your flake.lock to narrow down the potential changes that caused this? My first thought was #1282, but that shouldn’t affect the activation path.

[ceeeeej]

Does this help?

Here is an excerpt of the flake.lock.

"nix-darwin": {
      "inputs": {
        "nixpkgs": [
          "nixpkgs"
        ]
      },
      "locked": {
        "lastModified": 1738743987,
        "narHash": "sha256-O3bnAfsObto6l2tQOmQlrO6Z2kD6yKwOWfs7pA0CpOc=",
        "owner": "LnL7",
        "repo": "nix-darwin",
        "rev": "ae406c04577ff9a64087018c79b4fdc02468c87c",
        "type": "github"
      },
      "original": {
        "owner": "LnL7",
        "ref": "master",
        "repo": "nix-darwin",
        "type": "github"
      }
    },
    "nix-darwin_2": {
      "inputs": {
        "nixpkgs": [
          "nixvim",
          "nixpkgs"
        ]
      },
      "locked": {
        "lastModified": 1738743987,
        "narHash": "sha256-O3bnAfsObto6l2tQOmQlrO6Z2kD6yKwOWfs7pA0CpOc=",
        "owner": "lnl7",
        "repo": "nix-darwin",
        "rev": "ae406c04577ff9a64087018c79b4fdc02468c87c",
        "type": "github"
      },
      "original": {
        "owner": "lnl7",
        "repo": "nix-darwin",
        "type": "github"
      }
    },

[emilazy]

What I’m hoping to see is the value of the rev fields here before the update that broke things. If you don’t have your configuration tracked in Git that might be hard to obtain, though; I suppose we could try to derive it from the store paths in your previous system generations.

[ceeeeej]

I went all the way back to this nix-darwin commit and it is still happening: 492a720

I just rolled Nixpkgs back to a commit from ~2 weeks ago and still observed this happening.

I think this may be something with the mas utility and my system instead of a nix-darwin or a nix issue specifically.

[mirkolenz]

Ran into this as well and seems to be an ongoing issue with the mas utility: mas-cli/mas#722