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

[Matthias Beyer]

On 29-10-2015 13:26:33, Vladimír Čunát wrote:
> 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.

What means "simple" here?

> 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.

Would be nice to have a (C++) library which does the AST parsing
extracted from nix itself for exactly this, wouldn't it? The AST would
need to refer to the source file to do the linting.

> 
> 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).
> 

I'm not really sure on what to say here. Sounds interesting, yes, but
I'm not sure I can do things like this.

-- 
Mit freundlichen Grüßen,
Kind regards,
Matthias Beyer

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