[Nix-dev] Stackage Support Will Be Discontinued

[Rok Garbas]

Hi,

I'd like to reinforce Thomas'es writing and I'd like to add that as it
is important how we do things, it is also important how we reach the
consensus. I think any of us want only what produces best results.

Nix being a tool that works on many platforms with many different
languages, different setups, makes this even harder since not
everybody uses Nix the same way. And of-course changing is always
hard, so please be patient, it takes time to change somebodies
opinion, but doing this through conversation works best in the long
term.

It would be nice list down (or copy paste into this tread) pros/cons
and costs of keeping multiple LTS versions around.

Maybe having separate ``nixpkgs-haskell`` where all LTS versions leave
and only include latest LTS in nixpkgs would be a good enough
compromise.



On Fri, Jun 10, 2016 at 1:42 PM, Thomas Tuegel <ttuegel at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Peter and Anthony,
>
> On Thu, Jun 9, 2016 at 4:04 PM, Peter Simons <simons at nospf.cryp.to> wrote:
>> Hi Anthony,
>>
>>  >> [What is] a concrete use case that works for you today but that
>>  >> won't work after LTS-4 has been dropped?
>>  >
>>  > Someone who has a project that works with package versions in LTS-4,
>>  > but hasn't yet been upgraded to LTS-5 or 6. They can simply refer to
>>  > LTS-4 in their shell.nix for haskell packages.
>>
>> Oh, but you can absolutely do that! You can extend the set of available
>> packages to your heart's content and you can compose package sets that
>> provide any combination of versions as you please. The Haskell
>> infrastructure in Nix gives you that ability.
>
> Let me remark on this non-sequitor. Of course Anthony or I or anyone
> else could always extend or fork Nixpkgs to do whatever we want! I
> don't think anyone with experience in open source software needs this
> to be pointed out to them. That's obviously not Anthony's complaint,
> which is rather
>
> The choice to discontinue Stackage support makes Nixpkgs significantly
> less useful to some of our users.
>
> It seems disingenuous to pretend that some other complaint is being
> made, for the sake of summarily dismissing that complaint. As
> *volunteer* distribution maintainers, we are free to consider or
> disregard complaints at will; there is no need to misrepresent what
> people are saying.
>
> It is completely legitimate to take the position that the benefit (to
> our users like Anthony) of keeping Stackage does not outweigh the
> resource cost to Nixpkgs or the technical cost of finding a more
> efficient way to include those packages. This is obviously the
> position that the Haskell infrastructure and Nixpkgs maintainers have
> reached. Stating outright that they will not be swayed saves our users
> time and frustration because they can immediately seek solutions
> outside Nixpkgs.
>
> Regards,
> Thomas
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-- 
Rok Garbas
http://www.garbas.si
rok at garbas.si