| 16 Nov 2025 |
 Corngood | I've used it a lot over the years for all sorts of things so I'm not going to agree with that. I have a pretty complicated dev setup with emacs, X11, etc | 17:39:06 |
| Corngood | To me it just seems like the path of least resistance to making nix usable on windows for some of the things I'd like to use it for. | 17:40:16 |
 K900 | And look at the amount of patches they apply to all of that | 17:40:18 |
| Corngood | I've been through a lot of those patches getting nix to build in cross, and then natively on cygwin. Most of them aren't hacks. They just need some upstreaming work. | 17:41:35 |
| Corngood | I also think nixpkgs could be extremely useful for keeping that process alive. | 17:42:35 |
| Corngood | Anyway, I can make do without hydra support, I just need a binary cache and maybe better builders. Thanks for the builder recommendation above. Anyone have any thoughts on hosting a public binary cache for something like this? | 17:47:22 |
| K900 | Cachix probably | 17:47:32 |
 dramforever | maybe cachix | 17:47:37 |
| dramforever | you can either use nix-community.cachix.org which is annoying in the "it contains caches from building arbitrary untrusted PRs" way, or get your own nix-community sponsored? subdomain which i forgot how to do | 17:49:48 |
 hexa | I'm not excited about the idea of running windows builders for hydra down the road | 17:52:02 |
| Corngood | Thanks! I'll look into this. I don't mind funding something if it's not crazy expensive. | 17:53:08 |
| dramforever | namespace.so should be pretty good | 17:53:37 |
| Corngood | Setting cygwin aside. What are we looking at if other platforms (e.g. msvc) advance? | 17:53:40 |
| dramforever | and iirc even the free tier of cachix has quite a bit of space | 17:54:04 |
| hexa | I have no idea what msvc is | 17:54:07 |
| Corngood | microsoft's proprietary compiler. I guess I'm wondering about any builds that need to run on windows | 17:54:37 |
| hexa | run an rfc to extend the platform tiers and find out | 17:54:54 |
| dramforever | also for reference, the loongarch teams runs "our" own hydra on "our" nixpkgs fork, but at least that's still just linux | 17:55:10 |
| hexa | but effectively windows machines maintained by the infra team | 17:55:52 |
 7c6f434c | To add Tier-4 support RFC is not needed, to add Tier-3 RFC is kind of not enough | 17:56:07 |
| hexa | and the status quo is that we don't even have people to deal with the darwin machines as would be required | 17:56:12 |
| Corngood | I was thinking of running my own hydra/builder, but I wanted to check in to make sure there's no existing plans for windows builds. It sounds like there isn't. | 17:56:43 |
| dramforever | does nix builds even work on windows yet | 17:57:13 |
| Corngood | we can cross build a system image tarball (including nix) from linux, and then boot it and use it to build itself natively on cygwin. I'm not sure about mingw/msvc. I don't think they are as far along | 17:58:32 |
| hexa | Janne: are you offering? 🙂 | 17:58:45 |
| dramforever | oh, yeah i was thinking more about msvc | 17:58:56 |
| dramforever | that one probably doesn't work | 17:59:02 |
| dramforever | cygwin probably does but i'm going to worry about the sandboxing | 17:59:32 |
 Janne | Macos is not my main area of expertise. But tbh, windows would probably be way easier since there is software like trmm that makes fleet management easy while not costing a billion euros and locking you into their cloud | 17:59:42 |
| Janne | I could take over Linux if you take over all of the macos infra though 🤔 | 18:00:19 |
