[Nix-dev] Keeping nixpkgs up to date

[Mateusz Kowalczyk]

On 08/31/2014 03:43 PM, Chris Double wrote:
> 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 When I first started using NixOS the tor package was way out of date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.
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> 

I think the problem here is slightly different. It is not that
processing PRs is slow in general, processing PRs that are to go into
14.04 is slow. The problem is that it seems there are very few people
that have the confidence to merge into the stable branch so if Eelco
doesn't do it, it just rots away.

Perhaps we simply need more people designated to review PRs against stable?

-- 
Mateusz K.