| 17 Dec 2025 |
 Nadia | does anyone have any insight in what could be going wrong here? I'm encountering the same problem (but I'm not the one who posted the thread) https://discourse.nixos.org/t/embedded-compilation-with-llvm-clang/72406 | 14:43:13 |
 bake.monorail | Gentle reminder about the uclibc PR :) | 23:00:15 |
| 18 Dec 2025 |
| bake.monorail | I'm rather sad that end-of-life'd compilers are dropped from nixpkgs. old compilers are sometimes very useful. is it such a large burden to keep them alive? | 13:18:38 |
 K900 | Yes | 13:19:06 |
| K900 | Extremely so | 13:19:08 |
| bake.monorail | can you elaborate? | 13:19:47 |
 matthewcroughan @ 39c3 (DECT 94667 or 97340 or 67192) | Who is going to fix things when they break? | 13:20:47 |
| matthewcroughan @ 39c3 (DECT 94667 or 97340 or 67192) | do you just assume they build forever? | 13:20:51 |
| matthewcroughan @ 39c3 (DECT 94667 or 97340 or 67192) | that's a veneer that nixpkgs provides because people fix it you know | 13:20:58 |
| K900 | Nixpkgs also patches compilers fairly extensively | 13:21:01 |
| K900 | And adds additional wrappers on top | 13:21:07 |
| K900 | Which needs to be compatible with all supported compilers | 13:21:18 |
| K900 | This is all a significant amount of work | 13:21:27 |
| matthewcroughan @ 39c3 (DECT 94667 or 97340 or 67192) | only the things that actually get used/maintained, or that don't break often are included in nixpkgs pretty much | 13:21:32 |
| K900 | Especially when we're basically banned from using new compiler features until all supported compilers support it | 13:21:44 |
| matthewcroughan @ 39c3 (DECT 94667 or 97340 or 67192) | or at least that's the goal, and there's enough evidence of things being introduced that don't work like that in the past being stuck in nixpkgs that people rely on | 13:21:56 |
| bake.monorail | I'm looking at LLVM, there aren't a lot of patches, but yeah. | 13:22:21 |
| K900 | You can go look at any previous GCC version removal PR | 13:22:25 |
| K900 | Or LLVM for that matter | 13:22:30 |
| K900 | To see how much code those end up dropping | 13:22:36 |
| bake.monorail | what project are you talking about? nix?
is nix supposed to build with all the compilers in nixpkgs? I'm not saying that anything should build with it, just make the compiler available. | 13:23:08 |
| K900 | I'm talking about the cc-wrapper | 13:23:19 |
| K900 | Which is a component in nixpkgs that wraps compiler executables to make them behave the way we want | 13:23:35 |
| bake.monorail | to be honest I'd be happy to have older clangs even without the cc-wrapper, but I understand mine could be a niche use case. | 13:25:10 |
| bake.monorail | I'll take a look | 13:25:42 |
| bake.monorail | keeping old compilers building is not so hard, in my experience is just some new compiler error, nothing incredibly hard to patch. it's also useful for bootstrapping systems. I think it'd be valuable.
but yeah, it takes some effort. I'm curious about what features cc-wrapper needs. in my understanding it's just adding a bunch of compiler flags, but I didn't look too hard into it. | 13:29:04 |
| matthewcroughan @ 39c3 (DECT 94667 or 97340 or 67192) | I mean, the reason anything would get dropped is because it's not working, so if you don't want to drop it you could just make PRs | 13:29:35 |
| bake.monorail | are you sure? AFAIU there's a policy about dropping end-of-life'd compilers. I don't think they necessarily "do not work" | 13:30:21 |
| matthewcroughan @ 39c3 (DECT 94667 or 97340 or 67192) | like if it's an esoteric compiler/stdenv you're talking about I'm sure that's fine, as long as someone's maintaining it | 13:30:23 |
| matthewcroughan @ 39c3 (DECT 94667 or 97340 or 67192) | otherwise if it's like gccX where X is old, then no | 13:30:41 |
