[Nix-dev] "Package archeology" in nixpkgs

[Daniel Peebles]

That was actually my original motivation for doing this. I looked for the oldest GHC I could find (0.26) and it still wanted to be compiled by itself, although it said that HBC could do it if you put in more effort. I was hoping to get the binary bootstrapping out of the GHC build pipeline under the assumption that binary caching would work in largely the same way after an initial slow build. Still not sure if adding several additional intermediate versions of GHC to nixpkgs would be the best idea though :)

> On Sep 3, 2014, at 2:31, Ganesh Sittampalam <ganesh at earth.li> wrote:
> 
>> 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
> _______________________________________________
> nix-dev mailing list
> nix-dev at lists.science.uu.nl
> http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev