June 2023
Holochain is graciously sponsoring improvements to the Darwin situation in Nixpkgs for six months. They leverage Nix for development environments and value being able to do so across both Linux and macOS.
@reckenrode has been doing great work on the stdenv with the goal of decoupling it from the bootstrap-tools. So far the LLVM version in the Darwin stdenv was tied to the version included in the bootstrap-tools. The rework of the stdenv makes it possible to bump the LLVM in the stdenv independently from the bootstrap-tools. This took a lot of work so I focused on unblocking it. The rework PR got merged in the meantime and more work’s underway to bump LLVM.
There was another discussion on how some maintainers experience Nixpkgs’ Darwin support as a burden. My main takeaway is that people want a team to contact for Darwin issues that block Linux channel progress.
I’ve also resumed work on the stdenv bump. The source releases are a tangled mess of things (sometimes mutually) depending on each other. So we don’t want to bump individual source releases incrementally. But the full bump grew to over 130 commits (this is after some householding) and that’s a bit rough for the review process. So I’ve settled on a plan of introducing new versions of the source releases alongside the current ones. This way I can split the bump into small PRs focussing on individual releases and then when all of the releases have been merged, we can switch the entire set over all at once.