[Nix-dev] Fwd: Nixpkgs and NixOS moved to GitHub

[Bryce L Nordgren]

Drat! On this list, "reply-all" is needed. Sorry.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Bryce L Nordgren <bnordgren at gmail.com>
Date: Fri, Jun 22, 2012 at 4:03 PM
Subject: Re: [Nix-dev] Nixpkgs and NixOS moved to GitHub
To: Peter Simons <simons at cryp.to>


On Thu, Jun 21, 2012 at 4:03 PM, Peter Simons <simons at cryp.to> wrote:

> no-one suggested to let everybody commit poor quality changes. The
> suggestion is to let regular contributors who tend to commit high
> quality changes do that without having them go through some kind of
> formal review procedure, because we trust those people to exercise good
> judgment. My impression is that this model has worked fine in the past.
>

Honestly, it sounds like another layer of indirection is needed. The
"regular committers" should be the guardians of the core git repository
(say having branches "nixos stable" and "nixos unstable"). Anyone who wants
to can fork nixos unstable and add whatever they feel like. If they choose
to share it, they can make a pull request to The Guardians. After testing
in nixos-unstable, a batch of "good" contributions can be added to
nixos-stable.

In the spirit of nix, this can grow beyond two levels. Say an organization
forks nixos-stable and customizes the distribution for their needs. Their
CIO has an interest in security and making sure basic desktop environments
and office apps work. So they set up an internal hydra and 90% of their
people just do a nix-channel --update (or it's set up in a cron job). But
the pesky R&D folks want "wierd" apps, like "R" and PostGIS. So those who
need the software package it, submit the nix expressions to the
organizational hydra server, and the CIO can track who's installing what,
where. The CIO can submit pull requests for anything which is likely to be
of interest to the upstream.

I have not seen a three-tier (or more) setup like this in any other
distribution, especially where the packaging is tracked through three
different organizational levels (global nixos, organization, end user). But
now that you're using git, it should well be possible. Hydra is another key
enabling feature.

I'm not saying that this will ever happen, I'm just saying that you all now
have the tools to make it happen; and you're at the top level.
Expect/encourage other levels to form beneath you. :) You'll need to
outline the process for others to follow.

Bryce
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