| 18 Dec 2025 |
 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 | 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 | 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 | otherwise if it's like gccX where X is old, then no | 13:30:41 |
| matthewcroughan | you can't keep everything always forever, that's what you use old releases of nixpkgs for | 13:31:02 |
| matthewcroughan | and then you can maintain that in your own repo, with your own overlays, if you're truly serious about it | 13:31:16 |
| matthewcroughan | If it's "not that hard" as you say, then why not just keep an overlay? Not that hard either? | 13:31:55 |
| bake.monorail | I think compilers could be an exception due to their role in enabling building other software. but yeah, I feel like we're delving more on opinions rather than hard facts about what's specifically hard. | 13:32:16 |
| matthewcroughan | I mean, provide it as an overlay or flake then if you feel that way? | 13:32:48 |
| matthewcroughan | https://github.com/autc04/Retro68 | 13:32:49 |
| matthewcroughan | check that out | 13:32:52 |
| matthewcroughan | the maintenance status of retro68 makes it pretty valid for inclusion in nixpkgs instead of being its own flake though | 13:33:11 |
| matthewcroughan | whereas an out-of-date unmaintained thing is less relevant for nixpkgs inclusion | 13:33:30 |
| matthewcroughan | still shows how you can provide all that infra just fine outside of nixpkgs though | 13:33:46 |
| matthewcroughan | Like, overlays, overrideAttrs, override, all provide you with ways of achieving what you want to do, you can't keep everything forever in the tree | 13:35:37 |
