[Nix-dev] "Package archeology" in nixpkgs

[Daniel Peebles]

Hi all,

I've had a sudden urge to do some Haskell archeology and that led me
to a question about how we feel "philosophically" about keeping
abandoned projects and old versions of live projects in nixpkgs. I
think it could be valuable to preserve important pieces of Haskell
history (and perhaps other projects) and it seems like nix is uniquely
positioned to be able to do that well. I don't propose keeping all
versions of all the compilers around, but I'd like to pick out key
points in history and preserve them.

In particular, I was thinking of attempting to get the following working:
- HBC: perhaps the original Haskell compiler. I'd probably aim for a
version that implements Haskell 1.4 and one before that standard was
even proposed. Polymorphic map and (++) in Prelude!
- NHC: can build it with HBC
- GHC: the latest version that supports linear implicit parameters,
because they're gone now and I think people should be able to tinker
with them

The nice thing about doing this sort of thing with compilers is that
they tend to not have many dependencies, but I expect I might also
need to package up an old version of yacc for HBC. If it starts
getting too messy I might abandon the project, but I think it could
work fairly nicely. This would also pave the way to exploring other
interesting abandoned projects like fudgets and such.

How do people feel about this? Is it something I should maintain
independently of nixpkgs or does it belong in the main repo?

Thanks,
Dan