Ryujinx has been removed. Need to decide next steps.

[Faeranne]

Issue description

The owner of the Ryujinx organization has deleted the org and all data. According to riperiperi on the discord:

Yesterday, gdkchan was contacted by Nintendo and offered an agreement to stop working on the project, remove the organization and all related assets he's in control of. While awaiting confirmation on whether he would take this agreement, the organization has been removed, so I think it's safe to say what the outcome is.

This is a hard block to building ryujinx anymore. Like Yuzu before, something needs to be decided here, though in this case this is not a DMCA take down, so existing license applies. Might make just as much sense to find a valid fork in the not too distant future.

Maintainers

@06kellyjac
@artemist

[artemist]

I'll follow the fork situation. There were some active devs other than gdkchan and it's possible some of them work on a maintained fork, though a few have posted in the ryujinx discord guild that they will not be continuing to work on switch stuff.

The source code for 1.1.1401 is still in the nix substituter so building after an stdenv or c# change should not be a problem.

[artemist]

I tend to be against removing software just because it's no longer maintained. If there's a security vulnerability, mark it as such, but I don't see any reason to remove ryujinx before there's a suitable replacement

[griffi-gh]

Could point it to https://github.com/ryujinx-mirror/ryujinx for now? (until a proper fork appears)

[Naxdy]

@artemist There was a similar discussion about Yuzu when it was removed, starting with this comment: #293312 (comment)

I think, sadly, the logical conclusion is to remove Ryujinx from nixpkgs, until a well-supported and -maintained fork pops up. Those who continue to rely on Ryujinx (to which I count myself) will have to build it from source. I'll work on a flake for that in the meantime, which I will publish on my personal git instance sometime this week: https://git.naxdy.org/NaxdyOrg/Ryujinx/

[griffi-gh]

This is different from the Yuzu situation tho since it's not a legal takedown, just a repo deletion.
It should be fine to just point it to a mirror and mark the package as deprectated instead of outright removing it.

[Naxdy]

The reasons for the takedown don't matter. Upstream is gone, the expressions no longer compile without binary cache. Refer to the thread I linked to (you'll have to expand the comments), where all of this has already been discussed at length. The DMCA wasn't even part of the reason to remove it from nixpkgs.

I don't like it either, but there's no point in keeping software in nixpkgs that has no upstream.

[Naxdy]

As an update for everyone, I added an easy-to-use flake to keep Ryujinx in your configs to my repo of it. I don't plan on maintaining it at all however (not even updating dependencies), so it will essentially just be a snapshot of the last available version, until some other fork comes around.

GitHub: https://github.com/Naxdy/Ryujinx

Forgejo: https://git.naxdy.org/NaxdyOrg/Ryujinx

[niklaskorz]

Proposing moving to your own unmaintained flake at the same time as opening the removal PR for a package that you're not the maintainer of kind of feels like a hostile takeover, not gonna lie. I feel like this behavior should be discouraged.

[Naxdy]

I'm sorry you feel that way. The purpose of the flake is not to take anything over, but rather a short-term solution to provide a starting point for people who wish to continue building Ryujinx from source after its inevitable removal from nixpkgs, until a proper fork emerges.

Yuzu & Citra were removed from nixpkgs extremely quickly after their takedown from upstream, and the lack of alternatives both in nixpkgs and otherwise was a pretty big blocker for me personally, so my intent was to avoid others from having to go through the same hassle of sourcing recently removed build scripts, fixing the source inputs, and integrating them into their config, as I have done with Citra (a mirror of which I also host, here https://git.naxdy.org/Mirror/citra - just without the flake)

[Frontear]

Yuzu and Citra were as a result of a lawsuit from Nintendo (which was to some extent justified given the profiting).

Ryujinx is a slightly different edge-case and I think it's generally a better idea to take the maintainers perspective here, which is to leave the package alone. However if a suitable fork can't be found, I believe the best choice would be to simply mark as broken. This way can indicate to all affected users that this binary is not buildable for the time being.

[AndersonTorres]

I tend to be against removing software just because it's no longer maintained.

First, there is RFC 180 discussing that issue.

Second, let's be more accurate here.
This is not a mere "no longer maintained" abandonware situation (as in, say, Jikes), but a takedown: the original, pristine source simply disappeared.

[Atemu]

RFC180 does not cover upstream situations, only our downstream situation. It explicitly defines "unmaintained" packages as packages that do not have Nixpkgs maintainers listed.

We also don't really know what spurred the takedown yet. As far as we can tell, no legal action was involved, so it's not like we can expect mirrors to be taken down (as was the case with Yuzu).

[honnip]

I think it should use a mirror and disable updates, or be removed. There's no point marking it as broken if it's never going to be fixed.