[Nix-dev] Almost 50% of all Hydra jobs for Nixpgks/master don't compile

[Peter Simons]

Hi Eelco,

 > you really should set meta.platforms, to prevent the package from
 > showing up on platforms where it doesn't work.

I would like differentiate two kinds of "doesn't work":

 1) Doesn't work, won't work, and cannot possibly work (because the
    package is inherently system-dependent).

 2) The package *should* work on some platform, but doesn't (because we
    haven't managed and/or cared to fix the build errors).

I would black-list a platform because of (1), but not because of (2).

You argue that (1) should be black-listed, too, because:

 > Otherwise, we just create false hope (e.g. a Darwin user may see the
 > package in "nix-env -qa" and then discover that it doesn't work).

I would argue that it's common for relatively obscure packages to fail
during compilation. You cannot expect every package in "nix-env -qa *"
to compile. They don't. So I would rather show the package, so that
users of that platform can run into the issue and fix it (or trigger
some sort of process on Github/nix-dev to make other people help them
fix it or fix it for them).

I guess, both views have their respective pros and cons.

I think we agree, though, that the list of builds jobs scheduled on
Hydra should be cleaned up a little, right? That's the issue I really
care about.

Best regards,
Peter