[Nix-dev] Nixpkgs and NixOS moved to GitHub

[Marc Weber]

there are to important points to keep in mind:

(1) we want to trust the main stable branch (whatever that is) as much
as possible

This implies that arbitrary commits should get reviewed. However simple
patches can be reviewed most efficiently by "batch processing".

(2)
  we want new users to start contributing/testing as early as possible,
  we want to make it easy for people to collaboratively work on patches
  or mutliple ways to solve the same issue.
  
  And this can be done most easily by allowing write access to public.
  IMPORTANT: This implies that people know what they are doing - and
  that they may run the risk fetching malicious code this way.
  So whatever you  get from there should be reviewed by the comitters
  themselves

We don't want to give arbitrary people commit rights on nixos.org,
but github also offers gists. So does it make sense to create official
nixos/nixpkgs gists people can push their ideas to ?

Everybody can grant him/herself write access easily.
We could create a branch "trivial patches" which could be merged into
the main branch on a regular basis by batch processing done by core
members we trust (which may push to nixos.org)

This way no commits get lost - and some reviewing and commenting can
take place easily.
Some features seem to be disabled on gists such as commenting :(

Then it would be possible to write a 5 line guide about how to become a
nixos contributor: checkout the gist, make sure nobody pushed a bad
master HEAD, commit your stuff and push (on a different branch which
might be called trivial-patches)

I'd even allow rewriting history on that repository so that it can be
cleaned up easily. Most patches on the trivial-patches branch would go
away after rebasing on master after those patches got cherry-picked.

Its not perfect - but it might work well for many cases.




pull requests are fine for more complicated patches because commenting
can be done etc - but I agree on them being overkill for trivial
version updates and the like.

Of course top-git branches could be used if appropriate on gist repos,
too

Marc Weber