[Nix-dev] Keeping nixpkgs up to date

[Lluís Batlle i Rossell]

Humm I think that I commit to 14.04 any update I need, not waiting for Eelco
approval. :) I talk about final program updates, not libraries that cause big
rebuilds.

I use to think that anything can be reverted, and then the revert has to be
justified. That helps as to learn what to commit and what not.

So, I wouldn't be much affraid of commiting simple updates.

If anyone thinks that there are untouchable packages in 14.04 (I don't think so,
because recently there was even a stdenv update touching glibc and gcc), that
should be noted in the expression itself.

Well, these are only my points of view, maybe not representing a the nix
population at all.

As for the script processing PRs and notifying maintainers, it would certainly
help me. Specially if I'm not the one that has to run the script. :)

On Sun, Aug 31, 2014 at 04:22:36PM +0100, Mateusz Kowalczyk wrote:
> 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 When I first started using NixOS the tor package was way out of date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.
> > _______________________________________________
> > nix-dev mailing list
> > nix-dev at lists.science.uu.nl
> > http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev
> > 
> 
> 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.
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