To celebrate
getting rid of libCross (libcCross: Remove! by Ericson2314 · Pull Request #414321 · NixOS/nixpkgs · GitHub and treewide: Leverage new top-level `libc` in bootstrap, and simplify by Ericson2314 · Pull Request #414573 · NixOS/nixpkgs · GitHub)
making gccNgPackages (gccNGPackages: init by RossComputerGuy · Pull Request #414299 · NixOS/nixpkgs · GitHub, good job @RossComputerGuy!)
I wrote this blog post explaining the bigger pictures behind these two:
Enjoy!
Congratulations Tristan @RossComputerGuy and John @Ericson2314! I’m delighted that this has landed.
What an impressive piece of work, thank you very much for sticking at if for so many years! Not only that Nixpkgs — for all its historical warts and weirdness — is a great piece of educational material due to its relative transparency and already has helped shaping the thinking of a whole generation of software developers. But pushing the frontier and rolling out best practices keeps homogenizing the software ecosystem and thus making development much less tied to any particular platform. This has tangibly increased mobility of developers and end users alike. Nixpkgs made cross-compilation in many languages an everyday thing, and this is in no small part thanks to @Ericson2314‘s incredible dedication.
Thanks @fricklerhandwerk!
Yes, that’s exactly right. If we can get upstream buy-in, I think we can do a lot of good patching GCC’s build system to simplify things both for ourselves and others. We’ve got a unique perspective on how to make simpler and more uniform for everyone!
Incredible work!!! Really excited to see where gccNgPackages goes. (Would be great to see official support for individual building of components in upstream gcc!!)
Thanks!
Would be great to see official support for individual building of components in upstream gcc!!
Yes, I’ve sent a few patches already, but I haven’t tried to have a full conversation yet. I wouldn’t want to immediately propose official support just yet — first we have to show some longevity (e.g. switching over to GCC NG by default, showing that this doesn’t break the world; also, showing that it won’t be a huge endless hassle for upstream).
But it would be good to at least talk about the approach with upstream as something that might be worth informally supporting without guarantees, and try to get get those patches systematically reviewed and landed.
I have done some chit-cat on IRC already.