chia: drop

[bbjubjub2494]

Description of changes

Remove the chia derivation and its exclusive references, and disband the chia team.

For the record, these packages always required a ton of hacks and tricks to maintain in-tree because of very specific dependencies and other idiosyncrasies and I don't have the resources to do that anymore. It may work better out-of-tree in something like chia.nix.

Things done

• Built on platform(s)
  • x86_64-linux
  • aarch64-linux
  • x86_64-darwin
  • aarch64-darwin
• For non-Linux: Is sandboxing enabled in nix.conf? (See Nix manual)
  • sandbox = relaxed
  • sandbox = true
• Tested, as applicable:
  • NixOS test(s) (look inside nixos/tests)
  • and/or package tests
  • or, for functions and "core" functionality, tests in lib/tests or pkgs/test
  • made sure NixOS tests are linked to the relevant packages
• Tested compilation of all packages that depend on this change using nix-shell -p nixpkgs-review --run "nixpkgs-review rev HEAD". Note: all changes have to be committed, also see nixpkgs-review usage
• Tested basic functionality of all binary files (usually in ./result/bin/)
• 23.11 Release Notes (or backporting 23.05 Release notes)
  • (Package updates) Added a release notes entry if the change is major or breaking
  • (Module updates) Added a release notes entry if the change is significant
  • (Module addition) Added a release notes entry if adding a new NixOS module
• Fits CONTRIBUTING.md.

Priorities

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[bbjubjub2494]

weird I thought I forked the latest master

[delroth]

Could you add tombstones to pkgs/top-level/aliases.nix for the removed packages (as well as pkgs/top-level/python-aliases.nix for the Python packages)?

[bbjubjub2494]

ok this is ready. It should pass ofborg but I will check tomorrow whether I messed up something.

[delroth]

Thank you very much for the clean-up! Hopefully at some point in the future upstream will fix things to be more distro-friendly and we can maybe get those packages back in nixpkgs without them being a maintenance nightmare :-)

[meebey]

Today I wanted to bump my chia node and noticed the package was removed. @delroth @lourkeur any specific packaging pain that led to the removal? The feedback might help upstream to be less painful in the future (I will pass the message on).

[bbjubjub2494]

Hi @meebey, nice to know someone else is using this. So in short, what happens with chia is a mix of different things. Most often, it depends on newer package versions that the ones in master, so I would forward-port them, but that risks breaking something else. There's also always something unexpected that I have to go and debug. I don't think upstream can do much about it because their development style of bumping dependencies very often and having a lot of them is justified, and Nixpkgs's approach of manually and slowly bumping python modules is also justified, they are just incompatible.

I have been working on chia.nix as I said, and if the trust assumption is ok with you, you can get 1.8.2 or 1.8.3-rc1 right now, and more recent versions soon (tm)

[delroth]

In the case of #270155 which triggered this discussion of removal, it's also that upstream doesn't provide a working reproducible setup to build Python wheels - requiring nixpkgs to carry some large-ish patches that regularly break and require upkeep.