Reverting is fine when there is large amount of breakage but in reality it is often not so black and white. Large fraction of breakages I encounter is breakage of a few leaf packages – it is sad that it broke some packages but reverting the breaking change would be actually a change for worse.
The Qt breakage is actually one such example. Before the introduction of wrappers, every Qt package was broken. If people were lucky and had homogenous environment, it worked for them, but I marked several issues as duplicate every week:
- many qt apps crash on launch?? · Issue #36173 · NixOS/nixpkgs · GitHub
- Qt libraries shouldn't end up in system-path · Issue #15498 · NixOS/nixpkgs · GitHub
- qt5 impurities break some apps, reporting symbol lookup errors · Issue #17448 · NixOS/nixpkgs · GitHub
- lxqt.qterminal segfaults after qt 5.10.1 update · Issue #36160 · NixOS/nixpkgs · GitHub
- QT version mismatch error · Issue #37864 · NixOS/nixpkgs · GitHub
- …
The solution Thomas chose was to make the breakage explicit and give maintainers a way to finally fix the long standing issue. We cannot blame him for not having enough time to also fix the world.