[Nix-dev] Keeping nixpkgs up to date

[Alexander Kjeldaas]

With the awesome monitor.nixos.org system, we're prety close to 1) deriving
trivial patches (update version and sha256) automatically, 2) building
these trivial patches in a monitor.nixos.org-controlled branch, and 3)
notifying maintainers that a successful build of a new version exists so
they can 4) expose a particular commit as a pull request.

I have a feeling that 97% of the updates could be handled like this,
bringing the maintainance job down to a couple of mouse clicks.

Alexander



On Mon, Sep 1, 2014 at 1:24 AM, Roger Qiu <roger.qiu at polycademy.com> wrote:

> Many other package systems are decentralised (Gems/Composer/PyPI/NPM).
>
> Why not make Nix packages decentralised? So that maintainers can
> maintain their own packages and update them at any time? This would
> speed up evolution of Nix packages.
>
> One problem to solve is how do we make sure that unresponsive
> maintainers can be replaced by responsive maintainers.
>
> At this point, the all-packages.nix file will grow bigger and bigger. If
> maintainers can independently update their packages, which might
> introduce more bugs, I think there will need to be a stringent
> tagging/semantic versioning of each package, so that its possible to
> have many versions of the same package.
>
> If the package update process is kept the same, the more people that use
> nix, the more people who contribute to nix, the more work to accept
> pull-requests, which would have to mean an increase in the number of
> people who have the privilege to merge pull-requests. Otherwise there's
> going to be an increasing amount of work for a constant number of people.
>
> Thanks,
> Roger
>
> On 1/09/2014 12:43 AM, 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 When I first started using NixOS the tor package was way out of date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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