I'm ok to contribute, but I would require a bit of help on this :)

I didn't see an obvious spot to grab nightlies. Where do you grab the source from? Currently in nixpkgs we grab from the php website:

https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/3329b3430739ed71a64c3931315367cf2c7f45e4/pkgs/development/interpreters/php/generic.nix#L274

How about grabbing from the official git repo?

See this PR for discussion. As @etu mentioned we weren't supposed to grab releases from github... but I'm not sure if that is still the case.

I think that is for released versions, it should not be a problem to use Git snapshots for testing purposes. And it should not be that hard to make the expression support both source types – just go through the official PHP docs on building (I assume there are some; would expect it to be similar to other autofoo set ups).

Since the developments where they have changed their official developments to be hosted on GitHub I think this might have changed things as well.

It would be nice to be able to easily provide development builds, so if we switched all the builds to grab from GitHub tags, we could do that easily. But then it's not the "official release tarball".

The question is how much that matters?

What's the battle plan then ? :)

Someone needs to write it, should not be that hard.

If you give me some directions, I might give it a try :)

It should be just duplicating the php73 code in pkgs/phps.nix. Only for base, you would have something like

  baseMaster = (prev.callPackage generic (_mkArgs {
    version = "fooo";
    sha256 = "0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000";
  })).overrideAttrs (attrs: {
    src = /* … */;
  });

And if that does not work, make php builder accept a src ? null attribute, and use that when not null. (For development, you can point the flake to your local Nixpkgs checkout using nix flake update --override-input nixpkgs ~/Projects/nixpkgs, will need to run it each time you modify Nixpkgs code.)

#104 is an attempt at this.