Is it appropriate to open a nixpkgs bug to track an upstream bug?

Help
1

Nixpkgs unstable got a working build today and when I went to update I got a lot of major updates, but found an incompatibility between the Linux kernel at 5.3 and VirtualBox at 6.0.10.

I tracked down this bug in VirtualBox #18783 (Patch VirtualBox 6.0.10 for Linux kernel 5.3.y) – Oracle VM VirtualBox which patches the compile error I was seeing during my update. Fortunately I was able to just point directly at 5.2 kernel and resolve my issue. I was wondering what the practice is here, nixpkgs was the first place I looked when I ran into the issue.

Would opening a nixpkgs bug be the right thing here to track that issue and be a search target for anyone who might run into the same thing?

2 Likes
2

Would opening a nixpkgs bug be the right thing here to track that issue

Absolutely.

What’s even better is a PR that patches virtualbox using the patch on the upstream ticket. fetchpatch is your friend here.

2 Likes
3

Thanks @peterhoeg that’s a great point about adding the patch. I gave it a try this morning but it’s not applying cleanly so I suspect I might have to alter the patch to make it apply. I’ll give it another shot later.

1 Like
4

For any future references the PR for this change is at:
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/69323

1 Like