cope: remove

[NobbZ]

Description of changes

cope upstream is a bunch of wrapper script, which require the same named binary to exist somewhere else in PATH.

This design barely works with nixpkgs, and fixing this would probably require a good amount of patching. It is also unclear if the nearly 10 year old wrappers still work for the modern variants of the wrapped tools.

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/)
• 24.05 Release Notes (or backporting 23.05 and 23.11 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.

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[msanft]

Juding from how the upstream looks like, and a best-effort search on how many dependants this package has, removing it from nixpkgs makes a lot of sense to me.

[pSub]

+1 on the approval of @msanft

[eclairevoyant]

Even expanding the search, seems most of the usages of "cope" are in comments. Some of them are even commenting out cope from their package lists.

And maintaining patches for a 10+ year old codebase is nontrivial.

[NobbZ]

nixpkgs-review does cause astonishing 0 rebuilds, so I doubt there are any dependees.

[msanft]

nixpkgs-review does cause astonishing 0 rebuilds, so I doubt there are any dependees.

With the comment above, I referred to out-of-tree consumers of nixpkgs using this package. However, no in-tree dependants are good as well :D

[deftdawg]

Cope actually still works pretty well if it's patched for the warnings, I was running the warnings patch plus my own to make it use nixos's command-not-found.

Applied this overlay for my version @ https://github.com/deftdawg/cope

nixpkgs.overlays = [
    # Fix Cope using DeftDawg Version
		(final: prev: {
			cope = prev.cope.overrideAttrs (oldAttrs: {
				version = "unstable-2024-03-27";
        src = pkgs.fetchFromGitHub {
          owner = "deftdawg";
          repo = "cope";
          rev = "ad0c1ebec5684f5ec3e8becf348414292c489175";
          sha256 = "sha256-LMAir7tUkjHtKz+KME/Raa9QHGN1g0bzr56fNxfURQY=";
        };
	});
    })
 ];

Bummer to see it go from the official repo, I guess I'll have to roll it into a flake.

[NobbZ]

Feel free to PR your changes here and add yourself as a maintainer then.

I only skimmed copes sources and considered it worth a removal after having people run against that wall for about the 100th time in the last 12 months, just because cope has been the first result on the web search, CLI search, command-not-found, or nix-index for a given term.

Keeping it the way it was, seemed to be more troublesome than removing it.

Though I really do not know what warnings you are talking about.

I only have seen hard errors with it…

Running a cope-wrapped script always resulted in an error that exactly that command wasn't found.

[deftdawg]

Closing #274361 which was to fix those warnings (opened in Dec'23) and opening #304918 to restore cope.