[Nix-dev] contributing to nixpkgs/nixos

[Mathijs Kwik]

On Sun, Dec 11, 2011 at 8:49 PM, Peter Simons <simons at cryp.to> wrote:
> Hi Mathijs,
>
> I committed your patches -- the only exception being the update to
> btrfs-progs. I didn't feel comfortable making that change, because it's
> based on a development version from the upstream Git repository (rather
> than a proper release tarball). Maybe someone else who knows btrfs
> better than I do can make that change ...

That tarball (from the current package) is no longer there and was
outdated for a long time. For a long time, other distributions moved
to btrfs-progs-unstable, because it was actually more stable and
worked with more current features supported by kernel 2.6.37+. Since 2
weeks however, maintenance for btrfs-progs (non-unstable) was resumed
and work got integrated again. So maybe we will get a tarball soon.
But as stated, the current tarball is gone anyway.

>
>
>  > Now what's the procedure for contributing?
>
> The Nix community is fairly small, so we don't have any formal
> procedures worked out, really. If feel that a patch is ready, you can
> simply "git format-patch" it and e-mail the result to this list.
> Eventually, you should probably ask Eelco for access to the SVN
> repository, though.
>
>
>  > And what's the job for maintainers?
>
> Maintainers (as listed in the meta section) receive an e-mail from the
> Hydra build server every time one of "their" packages fails to compile.
>
>
>  > Arch linux allows you to flag packages out-of-date on their website,
>  > but as the nix maintainers team seems a lot smaller, I don't think
>  > nagging them about everything that's slightly outdated is a nice
>  > thing to do.
>
> Personally, I think it's quite alright to notify maintainers in such a
> case. If you attach a patch to the e-mail, it's probably going to be
> processed much faster, though. :-)
>
>
>  > So should I just send patches to them directly for stuff I upgrade?
>  > Or is there a more general place to submit patches to?
>
> Sending patches to individual maintainers is usually a good idea.
> Patches that are sent to this list have a tendency to be overlooked
> because everyone assumes that someone else is going to take care of it.
> That doesn't happen easily if you send patches in private e-mail.
>
> I hope this helps.

Yep, that's a lot clearer.

For now, I'll just contact maintainers with patches.
I hope the move to github will soon contain nixpkgs as well. pull
requests are easier than emailing patches.


>
> Take care,
> Peter

Thanks,
Mathijs
>
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