Solved: Overriding Gimp Attributes and a Dependent Package

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Why do you think that GIMP requires such an ancient GTK version? The latest pre-release version (2.99.18) actually expects at least 3.24.0.

This does not really replace GTK used by GIMP, you would need to use override for that.

Replacing gtk using overrideAttrs this mainly does the two following things:

  • It modifies the attribute set passed as an argument to stdenv.mkDerivation, adding gtk, which mkDerivation will pass as gtk environment variable to the builder.
    • This causes your gtk3-gimp to become a build dependency for gimp (and thus to be built before gimp can be built).
    • But since the gimp’s builder does not care about gtk environment variable, it will not do anything with the dependency. You could just as well do gimp.overrideAttrs { foobar = final.gtk3-gimp; }
  • It shadows the gimp.gtk attribute from passthru, which is only used by plug-ins. But plug-ins require GIMP itself to build so it won’t be of much use.

By the way, packaging such different versions is not as easy as replacing the source. There will be significant divergences between dependencies. See gimp: Testing dev version with Meson by jtojnar · Pull Request #67576 · NixOS/nixpkgs · GitHub for what is actually needed.