[Nix-dev] Python platforms

[Bryce Moore]

Hi Nix-dev,

(Apologies if this has been discussed - I'm a brand new nix user.)

I believe that many python packages in
pkgs/top-level/python-packages.nix have "linux" as the platform, where
"unix" or "all" may be more appropriate.

I noticed this with the "gevent" python package, as I was prevented
from building cabal2nix on my mac due to the platform declaration.
"construct" and "bitstring" are other python packages I happened to
notice are probably good on at least "unix".

I would love to submit a pull request to fix this for various python
packages that I can identify as "should work on unix" (or all), but I
can't conveniently test bsd (or cygwin).

How do I best move forward on this issue?

Here are the counts of the different platform strings for python-packages.nix:

  60 platforms.all
  48 platforms.linux
  14 platforms.unix
   2 with platforms; linux
   2 platforms.mesaPlatforms
   1 with platforms; linux ++ darwin
   1 with platforms; all
   1 pkgs.syncthing.meta.platforms

The unix vs linux numbers are particularly striking.

I ran the following to generate the above:

~/Downloads/apps/nix/nixpkgs$
grep "platforms\s=" pkgs/top-level/python-packages.nix | sed -E 's/
*platforms *= *(.*);.*/\1/g' | sort | uniq -c | sort -r

Thanks in advance,

-- 
bryce