[Nix-dev] Contributing to nixpkgs and maintainers burden

[Matthias Beyer]

On 10-04-2016 08:49:19, joachifm at fastmail.fm wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 10, 2016, at 07:00 AM, Ruben Astudillo wrote:
> > Hi nixers.
> > 
> > I have a couple of packages (hakuneko, haskell-related) on my local copy
> > of the repo. Time to time I've thought of contributing back. But I think
> > on the maintainers of nixpkgs and don't know if I am really making them
> > favor.
> Hi,
> 
> In my opinion you should just create pull requests and trust that all
> contributors are capable of ignoring things they don't care about (if
> not, that's their problem, not yours, IMO). What you can do to speed
> things up is explicitly mentioning people you think needs to see the PR,
> if the mention bot fails to do so (again, trust that people are able to
> manage what they pay attention to). Also, following the guidelines helps
> reduce overhead.

Hi Joachim, Hi Ruben,

yes, that's exactly what I do as well: I maintain a bunch of packages as well
and I do not have commit access (and I really don't want to have it, because the
mentioned mess).

All I do is to open PRs. From time to time I add a "update my packages" PR which
contains several commits where each commit updates one commit.

I then add a note in the PR that these commits can be pushed however the
maintainers like to.

IMHO we should have a workflow for package updates. Like a dedicated branch
which is _only_ for package updates (uncritical package updates, so security
patches etc should go elsewhere) and gets merged every 7 days or something. This
would _really_ reduce the noise in both master and the issue tracker, IMHO.

Maybe I can come around with scripts to automate this (and always test-build the
packages as well... would be nice, wouldn't it?).

-- 
Mit freundlichen Grüßen,
Kind regards,
Matthias Beyer

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