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jeffhykin@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

It definitely still is. Just because it’s very possible doesn’t mean it’s not a pain point for many people.

With the right tools getting an old version is fine. But mixing that old version with newer versions of other packages causes problems because of the nix LD_LIBRARY_PATH issue.

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pkill@programming.dev ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Eh so probably got lucky with the fact that the software I needed was statically linked

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- jeffhykin@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I was lucky for a while too, since you can also get lucky with dynamically linked libraries. Sometimes they find the new version of the .so (from other packages) and it works, but sometimes it finds a system .so and works until there is a system update. Which ruins the whole reproducability thing, although using the sandbox options of nix can help with this.
  
  Nixpkgs is better about patching versions now, but that’s the thing; using old versions is like going back in time. We’d need to go back in the git history and also patch the super old version.
  
  There are tools like nix-ld which can help, but they need to be setup and they’ve got edgecases too.
  
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