[HN Gopher] Contributing Scrutiny to Nixpkgs
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Contributing Scrutiny to Nixpkgs
Author : jnsgruk
Score : 63 points
Date : 2024-02-24 08:39 UTC (14 hours ago)
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| kevincox wrote:
| nixpkgs is a funny situation where it is incredibly easy to just
| run with patches and additions locally. It is often easier to
| make a service config just for you than something reusable and
| broadly useful.
|
| Thankfully the upstream contribution process is also pretty easy.
| So it seems like a lot does make it upstream.
| yorwba wrote:
| It's easy to open a PR, but not so easy to get someone to
| actually review it.
|
| There's currently 165 open PRs by first-time contributors
| adding a new package, some of which have been just sitting
| there without review comments for years.
| https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pulls?q=is%3Apr+label%3A%22...
|
| At least they're meticulously labeled so it's easy to find
| them.
| jacoblambda wrote:
| Yeah if your PR isn't getting the attention it needs, you
| probably just need to go to the discourse forum and post a
| request in the appropriate thread. There's one for PRs that
| need a review and one for PRs that have been reviewed but are
| pending a final check and merge by maintainers.
|
| https://discourse.nixos.org/t/prs-ready-for-review/3032
|
| https://discourse.nixos.org/t/prs-already-reviewed/2617
|
| IMHO there could be clearer guidance regarding this but as it
| is it's not terribly difficult to find and it works well
| enough.
| yorwba wrote:
| I suspect the reason that posting on Discourse works is
| _because_ this advice is not universally followed, so the
| workload is reduced relative to reviewing all open PRs. In
| other words, it 's a way to distribute limited grease to
| only the squeakiest wheels, not to grease everything
| better.
|
| But maybe I'm wrong and simply posting one of the 165 PRs
| per day to Discourse would be enough to clear that
| particular backlog in less than a year.
| ris wrote:
| There's also https://matrix.to/#/#review-requests:nixos.org
| quag wrote:
| While trying to get reviews, I posted on a forum a few
| times (I think it was this one). Got a little traction, got
| great advice and updated the patches. Sadly I hit the
| forum's new user posting limits and was unable to get the
| reviews to give the final approval. So I've had some
| patches accepted and others that have been sitting there
| for months/years.
|
| It has meant that after a burst of packaging, I've stopped
| submitting. I'd love to be able to get reviews even if it
| takes months. Any suggestions are welcome.
| zimbatm wrote:
| Try to come on Matrix; you'll be able to get much better
| traction there.
|
| Some community members are also working on a merge-bot[1]
| with the goal of allowing package maintainers to self-
| service their PRs. This will allow nixpkgs to scale much
| better. For now, it's limited to package upgrades
| submitted by the ryantm-updater bot.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs-merge-bot
| ydlr wrote:
| That is not too bad, considering there are about 90000
| packages in nixpks now.
| jnsgruk wrote:
| I've ended up with a small but excellent network of folks I
| reach out to on Mastodon who usually help me out with
| reviews.
|
| Most of the maintainers I've interacted with are open to a
| ping so long as you're not hounding them.
|
| I've also found posting the PR on Mastodon with the #NixOS
| tag has been helpful for attracting attention.
| Jhsto wrote:
| In a perfect world some of the development could happen in nix-
| community repos which are usually a bit more topic specific.
| The packages and modules would "move up" to nixpkgs on tag
| releases. This is how I initially thought the repos work
| anyway, but now I see that most of them just live as overlays
| and never quite sync up with the main repo.
| hamandcheese wrote:
| On this topic - I think nixpkgs could really use some tooling
| to delegate merge permissions (mediated by a bot, probably) to
| more folks for less critical areas.
|
| Nixpkgs needs more maintainers with commit permissions, but for
| a project as important as nixpkgs its hard to vet enough
| people.
| k8svet wrote:
| This is exceptional content. I'll be linking this frequently when
| I help users on Discourse and encourage them to become
| contributors.
|
| Going to subscribe to RSS and everything. So good, thank you.
| jnsgruk wrote:
| Author here, stoked you liked it! Thanks for the comment!
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| You should post this on the subreddit/s too: /r/Nix, /r/NixOS
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