[lukego]

> Rarely used packages go unmaintained.

I have a related pain-point. I want to maintain nix packages on their own long-lived branches. I also want to base these branches on the latest stable release rather than unstable.

This would require upstream nixpkgs to treat my package branches as equal peers and to pull their changes with 'git merge' like in the Linux kernel workflow.

Status quo seems to be that upstream expects people to work directly on the unstable branch and to make contributions using short-lived topic branches that can be rebased at any time.

I spent a lot of time packaging Pharo Smalltalk for nixpkgs but I found it too complicated to stay in sync with upstream and so I ended up orphaning that package and redoing it on a downstream overlay repo that insulates me from the upstream nixpkgs workflow.

This was discussed a bit over at https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/27312 but perhaps didn't get enough visibility because I also stubbornly prefer to work on Github and don't follow the mailing list.