[Nix-dev] "Package archeology" in nixpkgs

[Ganesh Sittampalam]

On 31/08/2014 04:31, Daniel Peebles wrote:

> 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.

On a related note, I've thought that nix would be a great way of trying
to bootstrap things like GHC from the original version (or at least the
oldest version we can find).

It's also sometimes useful to have old compilers around for testing,
though nixpkgs does go back a reasonable amount itself.

Ganesh