| 18 Dec 2025 |
 K900 | Yes | 13:19:06 |
| K900 | Extremely so | 13:19:08 |
 bake.monorail | can you elaborate? | 13:19:47 |
 matthewcroughan | Who is going to fix things when they break? | 13:20:47 |
| matthewcroughan | do you just assume they build forever? | 13:20:51 |
| matthewcroughan | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 |
