Ah I found: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qX0mgtSm360

It might be nice if this were somewhat easier to find.

@IvanMalison Please feel free to continue to post in this thread if you have trouble fixing up any of these dependencies.

@cdepillabout after watching that video, I feel like the process seems pretty heavyweight especially given what I am used to with nix stuff. Is all of that really necessary? is there really no simpler way to regenerate hackage-packages.nix?

@IvanMalison In general, I don't think there is an easier way.

Is there anything in particular you want to regenerate the hackage-packages.nix for? In general, I find that I am able to fix stuff without regenerating the hackage-packages.nix file, by adding overrides, etc where appropriate.

Well yes I mean I've already done that manually... the thing is I want to make sure that the changes in this patch actually work and generate the right stuff.

I'm just want to make sure that the packages are actually unbroken.

@IvanMalison Ah, I see.

In general, as long as you remove the packages from the broken-packages list, next time hackage-packages.nix is regenerated, they will be regenerated with the broken attribute set to false.

You don't necessarily have to worry about this when you send a PR. (Although I agree it would be nice to be able to check it on your end.)

So basically whether or not they are actually unbroken is really only checked when @peti runs the Regen?

I just have a feeling that because I'm unbreaking 4 different packages and that taffybar depends on them (transitively), something is likely to go wrong in that chain.

So basically whether or not they are actually unbroken is really only checked when @peti runs the Regen?

Ah, so what most people do in this situation is to try to rebuild them on your machine even though they are marked broken.

Here's how I would go about this:

# clone nixpkgs
$ git clone ...
# check out haskell-updates branch
$ git checkout haskell-updates
# try building taffybar, ignoring the broken packages setting
$ nix-build -A haskellPackages.taffybar --arg config '{allowBroken = true;}'
these derivations will be built:
  /nix/store/c42wqcwsrwdqrqlax5xrjl5yx90h07zw-status-notifier-item-0.3.0.5.tar.gz.drv
  /nix/store/5zpfbrbinjp3ddxia9camp7ynm3875z1-status-notifier-item-0.3.0.5.drv
  /nix/store/lv1dz2q6l6qsdgyycb6c5ka2y3wmv24j-taffybar-3.2.2.tar.gz.drv
  /nix/store/yv37jij5ls89qrwk64mdmnbp9y1ifg10-xdg-desktop-entry-0.1.1.1.tar.gz.drv
  /nix/store/w7hia7ibak058g12m3x9maz48d0si2yp-xdg-desktop-entry-0.1.1.1.drv
  /nix/store/ww4hwv55iaqhlr72bj815w7qa6mx9xj7-gtk-sni-tray-0.1.6.0.drv
  /nix/store/c97lri56p0rx9iyf07nj7rl9n0w0vqf8-taffybar-3.2.2.drv
these paths will be fetched (14.01 MiB download, 309.97 MiB unpacked):
  /nix/store/0ybxyf7zh7s6h71wzaj9vch3rffq59q6-gi-dbusmenugtk3-0.4.8
  /nix/store/12sk3y0j4857sss4w0kdalrh43nj8c5v-MissingH-1.4.2.0
  /nix/store/3bl0ixmi1xd6cfdbrsa5s9ajhwvrnd0w-multimap-1.2.1
  /nix/store/3rkglfk5aa3114f42fdg7rn73xbjamx2-xmonad-0.15
...

You can see from this output that Nix is going to try to build status-notifier-item, taffybar, xdg-desktop-entry, and gtk-sni-tray. Nix can get all the other packages from the cache. This normally happens when all other packages are able to be built successfully, but those few packages are marked broken.

First I would try building each of these (or at least the lowest dependencies) and seeing if it succeeds.

First, I'll randomly pick status-notifier-item:

$ nix-build -A haskellPackages.status-notifier-item --arg config '{allowBroken = true;}'
...
/nix/store/v8adbn3dnmv78pwvvch59mkmlh4yqc5h-status-notifier-item-0.3.0.5

This builds successfully, so you can mark it as unbroken (as I think you've currently done in this PR) and move on.

Next lets try xdg-desktop-entry:

$ nix-build -A haskellPackages.xdg-desktop-entry --arg config '{allowBroken = true;}'
...
/nix/store/sz96745dg79d2r6x7qzjzyjv2yb8kia1-xdg-desktop-entry-0.1.1.1

This currently builds, so you can mark it as unbroken and move on.

Next lets try gtk-sni-tray:

$ nix-build -A haskellPackages.gtk-sni-tray --arg config '{allowBroken = true;}'
...
/nix/store/8vly1zawn8ld5h5flhmm0r97dcy5drlk-gtk-sni-tray-0.1.6.0

Looks likes it builds! Mark it as unbroken and move on!

Let's try taffybar:

$ nix-build -A haskellPackages.taffybar --arg config '{allowBroken = true;}'
...
/nix/store/cff4y9rqpmm37raibqvh34wckkpdgqa6-taffybar-3.2.2

Okay, looks like everything built. We didn't even need any overrides!

Since you've already marked these four packages as unbroken, this PR is complete. I'll merge it in!

hackage-packages.nix gets regenerated about once a day, so if you watch the haskell-updates branch, you should see it be regenerated soon, and then you can use taffybar like normal.