Can I start nix-shell with packages from different revisions?

Question

I can start nix-shell with a package from a particular revision, eg

nix-shell -p ktlint -I nixpkgs=https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/archive/141439f6f11537ee349a58aaf97a5a5fc072365c.tar.gz
nix-shell -p jq -I nixpkgs=https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/archive/7d7622909a38a46415dd146ec046fdc0f3309f44.tar.gz

Can I start nix-shell with two packages, but from different revisions, in one command? For example, if I wanted both ktlint and jq from the specific revisions above?

Answer 1

Setting NIX_PATH=nixpkgs=... is just syntactic sugar enabling references like <nixpkgs> to work; but one doesn't need to use import <nixpkgs> exclusively -- one can also import directly from an explicit path.

nix-shell -E '
let
  pkgsA = (import (builtins.fetchTarball https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/archive/141439f6f11537ee349a58aaf97a5a5fc072365c.tar.gz) {});
  pkgsB = (import (builtins.fetchTarball https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/archive/7d7622909a38a46415dd146ec046fdc0f3309f44.tar.gz) {});
in
pkgsA.mkShell {
  buildInputs = [
    pkgsA.ktlint
    pkgsB.jq
  ];
}'