doc: minimal documentation of supported platforms

This commit adds minimal documentation of the supported platforms.
More exhaustive documentation would require producing a list of
platforms for each of the 7 tiers. This was attempted in #245368, but it
quickly became clear that that would be a long-term effort.

In the meantime, this commit adds the most important information to the
manual.

Co-authored-by: Valentin Gagarin <valentin.gagarin@tweag.io>
This commit is contained in:
Lorenzo Manacorda 2023-07-25 13:40:09 +02:00
parent 4a359e2106
commit b19e9bebdc
2 changed files with 19 additions and 0 deletions

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# Using Nixpkgs {#part-using}
```{=include=} chapters
using/platform-support.chapter.md
using/configuration.chapter.md
using/overlays.chapter.md
using/overrides.chapter.md

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# Platform Support {#chap-platform-support}
Packages receive varying degrees of support, both in terms of maintainer attention and available computation resources for continuous integration (CI).
Below is the list of the best supported platforms:
- `x86_64-linux`: Highest level of support.
- `aarch64-linux`: Well supported, with most packages building successfully in CI.
- `aarch64-darwin`: Receives better support than `x86_64-darwin`.
- `x86_64-darwin`: Receives some support.
There are many other platforms with varying levels of support.
The provisional platform list in [Appendix A] of [RFC046], while not up to date, can be used as guidance.
A more formal definition of the platform support tiers is provided in [RFC046], but has not been fully implemented yet.
[RFC046]: https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/blob/master/rfcs/0046-platform-support-tiers.md
[Appendix A]: https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/blob/master/rfcs/0046-platform-support-tiers.md#appendix-a-non-normative-description-of-platforms-in-november-2019