[Nix-dev] Keeping nixpkgs up to date

[宋文武]

Mateusz Kowalczyk <fuuzetsu at fuuzetsu.co.uk> writes:

> Hi,
>
> Some weeks ago the nixpkgs monitor[1] started to work again and the
> numbers there are worrying. I inline the numbers at the bottom.
>
> Now, there are 2000+ outdated packages with maintainers listed and 1000
> outdated without maintainers at all (and the 1600 whose status we don't
> know). Even if somehow half of these are false-positives (which they
> aren't), that's still a huge number.
>
> It is difficult to try to make a dent in that number as an individual
> and we don't have that many people actively maintaining the things they
> are listed under.
>
> I'd like to propose a system like Gentoo's, the herd system. Basically
> we split up packages up by categories and assign maintainer group to
> each category. For example, we might have something like
>
> Haskell packages – Haskell maintainer group
> games – games maintainer group
> Python packages – Python maintainer group
> emulators – …
> … and so on.
Yes, a group title feel better than individuals.
>
> We then recruit/encourage people to join the groups they are interested
> in. This means that rather than a single person maintaining some
> packages and being single point of failure, we now have multiple people
> maintaining a larger pool of packages. It is then easy to ask questions
> like ‘what games are outdated?’.
>
> Of course this can be implemented alongside the existing system of
> listed individual maintainers.
>
> It also gives us the benefit of being able to look at each group and say
> ‘oh, games don't have any maintainers, we should look for some people to
> do that’ which is currently very difficult. It's also much easier to
> ensure the groups remain active as opposed to having to chase down each
> individual maintainer listed on each package.
How to ensure :)
>
> At the beginning it will simply transform the problem of ‘we need to
> find maintainers for 2000 packages’ to ‘we need to find maintainers for
> 10 groups’. Groups can then simply use the monitor to see which packages
> become outdated with hopes that someone in the group makes the update.
>
> What do you think? I think something like this is inevitable with the
> ever-growing number of packages and users or we end up with the
> situation like we have today, with thousands of outdated packages
> without maintainers or with inactive/busy maintainers listed.
Agree.
>
> The changes required would be to categorise packages we have (easy,
> simply go by how nixpkgs is organised), assign a group (an e-mail
> address, perhaps a mailing list or something) to each and go through
> each expression to add the respective group's e-mail.
>
> Thanks!
>
> Current numbers:
>
> Packages                 #
> Potentially vulnerable	 234
> Unmaintained not covered 1691
> Outdated unmaintained	 1048
> Outdated	         2143
>
>
> Maintainers   Packages
> 0             4347
> 1             2065
> 2             743
> 3             254
> 4             268
> 5             1
>
> [1]: http://monitor.nixos.org
> [2]: http://devmanual.gentoo.org/general-concepts/herds-and-projects/
>
> -- 
> Mateusz K.
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