When encountering an unsupported protocol, there's no need to retry.
Chances are, it won't suddenly be supported between retry attempts;
error instead. Otherwise, you see something like the following:
$ nix-env -i -f git://git@github.com/foo/bar
warning: unable to download 'git://git@github.com/foo/bar': Unsupported protocol (1); retrying in 335 ms
warning: unable to download 'git://git@github.com/foo/bar': Unsupported protocol (1); retrying in 604 ms
warning: unable to download 'git://git@github.com/foo/bar': Unsupported protocol (1); retrying in 1340 ms
warning: unable to download 'git://git@github.com/foo/bar': Unsupported protocol (1); retrying in 2685 ms
With this change, you now see:
$ nix-env -i -f git://git@github.com/foo/bar
error: unable to download 'git://git@github.com/foo/bar': Unsupported protocol (1)