https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/478778 should fix this.

of course I care about Darwin and am interested in keeping it working. I have a big local stack of fixes and clean‐ups for LLVM and macOS 26 that I worked on during the testing for the LLVM 21 and CMake 4 bumps a couple months back, but I didn't anticipate stumbling into a governance clusterfuck that sapped most of my energy for technical work, and then prioritizing things like "stopping the Nixpkgs repository from going read-only" and "triaging 4 months of committer application backlog" over pushing non-urgent drafts out, and then I was trying to take a rare break from Nixpkgs over the holidays…

the "having to triage/fix issues with things we don't care about" problems we have in staging-next are a pervasive issue, not just limited to Darwin. we don't complain about "Linux users" not doing enough when a random channel blocker breaks on Linux. I try to take a look at things when I can, but I can't take responsibility for e.g. every random bug in Nix just because it triggers on macOS.

it's not like we have been merging untested stuff with regressions – the builder OS version bumps are essentially getting bumps of a bunch of world-rebuild libraries merged into staging across all release branches underneath us. in the future we should probably make sure to coordinate non-security macOS major version bumps on the builders with Darwin team availability and testing.

I do my best to help reduce the burden; between Randy's SDK rework and dropping support for old versions and x86_64-darwin, Darwin-specific packaging issues are much rarer than they used to be and we should hopefully have much more Darwin builder capacity soon. I also try to reduce the bus factor by encouraging people to get involved (https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/478468 went up just yesterday), but it's hard to recommend the experience of Darwin team to anyone right now.

I understand it is frustrating having to deal with anything in Nixpkgs without personal interest, but it is really demotivating to put in a ton of work taking responsibility for issues across the tree when it constantly gets met with implications that you're not doing enough or that we should drop Darwin. I've thought about quitting the project before because of it. anyway, probably not a useful rant but I think we would have more volunteer resources for Darwin triage if it was less miserable to offer it.

implications that you're not doing enough or that we should drop Darwin

I didn't mean to single out anyone in particular, and I know that you fix lots of things.

I was trying to keep fixing the worst macOS blockers, but it's been too much for me lately. It doesn't help that I don't know much about macOS-specific stuff, so it's more slow and painful, which is one of the reasons why I'd prefer that actual macOS users would do most of these. (but sure, it also seems more fair to me)