Can you include some reasons for having two versions of ninja? Usually we just package released software.

@matthewbauer Ninja's release hasn't been bumped for a long time (September 2017), and the git version contains many fixes that aren't in any release, including mesonbuild/meson#3992 which was an issue at my workplace. The official stance (see comments on that issue) seems to be that distributions should just package the git.

I'm happy to just bump default.nix to the git version if you'd prefer, I just thought it would be safer to keep the release packaged in case the git one broke something. I see similar patterns for several other packages, e.g. arb/arb-git (though I note that arb-git is actually older than arb, so maybe not a great example…).

Yeah I think we would prefer to just bump ninja. Alternatively, you could just add the patch from https://github.com/ninja-build/ninja/pull/1219.patch with a note about it being in the next released version. This would avoid the potential of including other commits that break things.

Okay, changed it to bump. I think it's if anything safer to bump wholesale than to try to back-port patches.

This pull request should go to staging branch first. I would like to also get an opinion from @jtojnar

I did not look into ninja very much (meson has mostly hide it from me) but, if possible, I would prefer fetchpatching the PR, there might be many changes for the last year and the risk of breakage would be probably greater. We should probably also let ofborg or hydra build at least some of the packages that depend on ninja to be more certain there were no regressions. Otherwise, I also prefer a single package.

@jtojnar seems right that it might be better to pick the relevant commit. I have looked at Ninja commit history and noticed that the master branch introduces this issue: ninja-build/ninja#1418

There may be other updates in there that are important to people. Maybe we should revert to the original approach of having two packages?

Then they can backport the other patches too. We already have too much of multiple package clutter IMO.

I'm OK with a new ninja-unstable if that helps you participate in its development (at least by testing it), but nevertheless we should include https://patch-diff.githubusercontent.com/raw/ninja-build/ninja/pull/1219.patch in the default ninja.

ninja-1.9.0 has been released: https://github.com/ninja-build/ninja/releases/tag/v1.9.0

Oh, merged 1.9.0 as #55008

Yep, I decided to leave this minefield alone and push ninja for a proper release instead. Thanks @vcunat :)