[Nix-dev] Keeping nixpkgs up to date

[Chris Double]

Speed of processing pull requests for new packages is an issue.
Anything that can be done to reduce this would be helpful. It's
demotivating as a contributor to do what seems to be a simple package
update of a minor version and have the pull request take weeks.

When I first started using NixOS the tor package was way out of date
so I updated it. That went pretty quickly. 3 months ago I did a pull
request to update to a recent tor minor release on unstable. This went
through ok. I waited a couple of weeks for testing then did a pull
request to get it in 14.04;

<https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/3136>

Updating Tor on 14.04 to version 0.2.4.22 and Tor Browser to 3.6.2.
This has been sitting for two months. Since then a newer version of
Tor and Tor Browser has come out so it's already out of date. I
haven't bothered trying to do a pull request to update to the new
version as there seems no point given that processing pull requests
must be overloaded.

I can see this only getting worse as more people do pull requests for
package updates.

New packages are no doubt worse since it takes more analysis of the
pull request for someone to approve it.