[Nix-dev] Several updates to rather important Python packages

[Freddy Rietdijk]

Hi Nixers,

For some time now I've been submitting new Python packages as well as
updates. Occasionally, an update arrives with a very large impact, e.g. the
currently available numpy update to 1.10.0 (#10255
<https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/10255>).

For some of the cases, like this one, I don't have the computational power
available to build all derivations. And updates like these are likely to
break some dependents. I am wondering what to do in such case. Make a PR
for staging and ask for it to be submitted, even though it might break
dependents?

Sometimes it happens that updating the dependents is sufficient. However,
there are cases this could be a lot of work, updating each and every
failing dependent till there are no failures.

An example is the PR I linked to, I update numpy to a version which allows
it to run with Python 3.5. However, many new derivations that can now be
build will likely fail due to Python 3.5 incompatibilities. What should we
do in such case? Not update? Or update and have many failures? I think
that, because a new NixOS release is still far away, now is the time to
push such updates. It is then up to the maintainers of the dependents to
fix their packages.

The same goes for scipy in #9146
<https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/9146>.

And especially markupsafe. The current version is 0.15 which is from July
2011. Updating this one to the latest affects not only many Python
packages, but also most of KDE.

Kind regards,

Freddy
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