| 18 Dec 2025 |
 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| matthewcroughan | whereas an out-of-date unmaintained thing is less relevant for nixpkgs inclusion | 13:33:30 |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 |
| bake.monorail | I feel you're being a bit unnecessarily adversarial. this said, having an overlay is quite different story, since it does not enable you to reuse "private" logic from nixpkgs.
for instance, in the GCC package it's not possible to override the versions without forking (there's a "private" variable determining the versions). | 13:35:42 |
