Comment by cmm
5 years ago
regardless of the specifics here, stuff like this is liable to pop up a lot in the coming several years while NixOS is gaining more popularity but casual (as in "not willing to put in the effort of supporting off-beat distributions") OSS authors can still reasonably ignore it. the amount of patching that Nixpkgs packagers have to do sometimes is pretty extreme
Nothing wrong with patching
Part of the beauty of Nix is it's easy to maintain patches - this can be nice cost-wise compared to upstreaming in many cases.
Not saying upstreaming isn't a generally good thing, but it's nice to have this other option.
Generally if the patch is not-specific to nixpkgs, we ask the contributor to upstream the patch, and then we have a `fetchpatch` utility which makes it easy to pull from an upstream source.