[Nix-dev] Ideas for a NixOS-related bachelors thesis?

[Vladimír Čunát]

Hi.

> Anyways, binary cache on a per-user basis (where I only have to trust
> myself) would be a nice thing for the first step.

There are already simple ways how to use individual machines as binary
caches, getting whatever is in /nix/store.

>     The idea was to create a source-to-source compiler and translate
>     (for example) Archlinux pkgbuild files to nix expressions.
> [...]
>         Medium: compile a tree of packages

I don't understand what "compile a tree of packages" means, similarly
for "Complex/Large".


Personally, I don't think that nixpkgs suffers much from missing
packages (the amount). We have quite a few tools for generating *.nix -
some language/project-centric ones (cabal2nix, python2nix, CPAN, X.org,
TeX Live, ...), and at least one more general one
https://github.com/ttuegel/autonix-deps (only cmake ATM but generic)

It might be more useful to have (better) QA tools to improve quality.

For that, IMHO it would be nice to have some lintian-like checks run
automatically (not blocking the regular builds). We have nixpkgs-lint
tool (in perl) that does some simple analysis of expressions (without
building anything), but I think most problems are only testable when you
have the actual binary output.

The runtime might be done by extending the nixpkgs monitor (ruby) which
already does similar things already: it uses Hydra to test
auto-generated patches, collects and displays info about package notes
of various severity (updates available, security problems). Another way
might be extending Hydra directly (perl) to be able to filter problems
by severity etc. It would be also great if we were able to simply pull
Lintian tests in some way (written in perl).

BTW, the monitor might also somehow collect mapping package ->
issues+PRs filed against it (and thus e.g. show maintainer -> issue
mappings).


Vladimir


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