In programming, technical debt often accumulates over time. It often occurs with legacy code or things which are not maintained often. Recently, I became one of the maintainers for LLVM in Nixpkgs. With LLVM in Nixpkgs, I discovered there was some technical debt which could limit the expansion of LLVM. This also would make it more difficult to package new versions of LLVM. So as a maintainer of LLVM, I made the descision of refactoring all of the version specific subpackage files for LLVM. This work was split up into 7 pull requests and was known as the “commonification PR’s”. My goal was to reduce all the Nix files responsible for the subpackages in LLVM for each version. This ended up making a new directory in Nixpkgs inside of the LLVM specific one which ended up being called “common”. Some of this work was already done by @Artturin, however my work involved every package in LLVM.

Now you may be wondering how this was done. I had to figure out which things were common between each package in LLVM across each version and limit certain things based on the version. I ended up using a very useful tool called nix-diff made by @Gabriella439. This tool allowed me to get the differences between my local version of a package and the upstream. I used a very simple wrapper script so I would only have to do something like nix-flake-diff.sh github:NixOS/nixpkgs#llvmPackages_18.clang .#llvmPackages_18.clang.

With the nix-flake-diff.sh script, I was able to see how things deviated to prevent Nix from rebuilding. Rebuilds were not acceptable as to prevent any unknown bugs from cropping up and were out of the scope for this project. After 4 days, I was able to reduce the number of files. Each pull request made for each specific LLVM package ended up removing about 1,000 LoC and added under 400 LoC. This resulted in a smaller number of files to manage. It also allows for easily applying changes across all versions without touching other directories.

Now that it has been more than a month since the pull requests for this project have been merged, Nixpkgs is nearly ready for the next LLVM version. LLVM 19 will be easier to package with the number of files to manage is a lot less. Another reason why LLVM 19 and future versions of LLVM will be much easier to package is because of consistent git updating. I will cover what that entails in the future.