[Nix-dev] FOSDEM meeting summary

[Andres Loeh]

Sorry for the long delay. I've finally typed in the summary
of our FOSDEM meeting.


Documentation
  -  document best practices for Nix packages / expressions
     (programming idioms, coding guidelines)
  -  should possibly be a "living" document (use a Wiki?)
  -  also include guidelines on which files of packages should
     go to which subdirs in the Nix store
  -  we need both "examples" and "policy documents"
  -  special policies for specific domains might be needed
     (Perl, Haskell, ...)

  Decision: niksnut should set up a basic document (Docbook) that
     others can then work on.

Quality Control
  -  can be done server-side and client-side: server-side has
     the advantage that it checks the "actual tree" and not the
     variant that the client is using; OTOH, people were worried
     that server-side quality control could actually keep people
     from submitting fixes if somehow the main tree gets broken
     anyway; a solution would be to implement an override
  -  how can we prevent packages from picking up impurities if
     built in a non-NixOS environment; an experimental possibility
     would be to implement an strace/ptrace based purity checker

  Decision: implement server-side quality control as soon as possible

Error Messages
  -  the nix-env traces are not very informative
  -  errors in the user configuration lead to incomprehensible
     error messages
  -  info from niksnut: the new abort statement replaces assert
     and takes an error message as a parameter

Homepage
  -  it was suggested to change the name of Nix to something else
     entirely ...
  -  Idea: move everything to nixos.org. Have svn.nixos.org,
     www.nixos.org. Start seeing Nix as a subproject of NixOS rather
     than the other way around.
  -  IRC channel should be moved from #trace to #nixos
  -  niksnut will nevertheless continue efforts to get www.nix.org.
  -  logo ideas: snow (crystal), sloth
  -  nixpkgs should get a better web presence

  Decision: move stuff under NixOS, create a list of open projects,
     including student projects

State support (Wouter's work)
  -  could possibly be included in the future, but a lot of details
     remain unclear, so not for now

External kernel modules
  -  enforce gcc/libc consistency?
  -  this was brought up by armijn, but niksnut claimed it's not
     an issue

License/redistribution
  -  some support for tracking licenses might be needed in the
     future

Student projects
  -  seamlessly running Linux applications in a VM
  -  implement an strace/ptrace-based purity checker for Nix packages


Cheers,
  Andres

-- 

Andres Loeh, Universiteit Utrecht

mailto:andres at cs.uu.nl     mailto:mail at andres-loeh.de
http://www.andres-loeh.de