Can't rebuild on `nixos-unstable` because a package is marked as broken. Should I fix it or ditch it?

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Can’t rebuild on nixos-unstable because the bower-json package is marked as broken. Should I fix it or ditch it?

I’d like to test @lilyinstarlight’s code for sc3-plugins in this pull request. The contribution review guidelines seem to indicate that I need to do such tests on nixos-unstable. I’ve been using nixos-21.11.

So I switched channels and rebuilt, which generated this error:
ror: Package ‘bower-json-1.0.0.1’ in /nix/store/6nbr2k7fnz1ib5cwlxs3mgknxk6v6mdl-nixos-22.05pre369524.5181d5945ed/nixos/pkgs/development/haskell-modules/hackage-packages.nix:46654 is marked as broken, refusing to evaluate.

Should I try to fix the broken package? Or should I change whatever depends on it to depend on something else? If the latter, how can I determine what depends on it?

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Usually, that’s a good question for the package maintainers however it looks as though bower-json doesn’t have any maintainers rn.

Instead you could look at the git blame to find out who marked it as broken and ask them perhaps…

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I suspect this is because of spago. One workaround could be to disable installing spago until it has been fixed. aeson 1.5 tracking issue · Issue #167859 · NixOS/nixpkgs · GitHub is the issue tracking the problem, the person most responsible would be @cdepillabout who is maintaining spago iirc.

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You were right! It was spago's fault. Once I had disabled that I needed to disable ponyc, but the error message for the latter actually mentioned it, so it was easy to find a solution. (Maybe an over-blunt solution but I don’t use pony anymore.) Thanks for knowing what to do in the first case!

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I believe --show-trace should let you figure out what the package is that ultimately causes the problem even if it’s a dependency of a dependency of a dependency… – the catch being that the stack traces require quite a lot of digging through.

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