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ghc.nix installs too many things by default

It seems that some unecessary tools are provisioned by ghc.nix

  • Formatters are not required for GHC development (there is an ormolo override)
  • Linters are not required for GHC development (hlint is listed as a system dependency)

Therefore support for them being provisioned should be removed from ghc.nix in order to simplify the maintenance.

These are all non-standard configurations which should be disabled by default

  • withGrind is by default true
  • withDtrace is by default true
  • withGdb is by default true
  • withDwarf is by default true
  • withNuma is by default true
  • withPerf is enabled by default

Running nix develop starts downloading a large number of dependencies which most developers will never need.

Edited by Sylvain Henry