Mateusz Kowalczyk <[email protected]> writes:
> Hi, > > Some weeks ago the nixpkgs monitor[1] started to work again and the > numbers there are worrying. I inline the numbers at the bottom. > > Now, there are 2000+ outdated packages with maintainers listed and 1000 > outdated without maintainers at all (and the 1600 whose status we don't > know). Even if somehow half of these are false-positives (which they > aren't), that's still a huge number. > > It is difficult to try to make a dent in that number as an individual > and we don't have that many people actively maintaining the things they > are listed under. > > I'd like to propose a system like Gentoo's, the herd system. Basically > we split up packages up by categories and assign maintainer group to > each category. For example, we might have something like > > Haskell packages – Haskell maintainer group > games – games maintainer group > Python packages – Python maintainer group > emulators – … > … and so on. Yes, a group title feel better than individuals. > > We then recruit/encourage people to join the groups they are interested > in. This means that rather than a single person maintaining some > packages and being single point of failure, we now have multiple people > maintaining a larger pool of packages. It is then easy to ask questions > like ‘what games are outdated?’. > > Of course this can be implemented alongside the existing system of > listed individual maintainers. > > It also gives us the benefit of being able to look at each group and say > ‘oh, games don't have any maintainers, we should look for some people to > do that’ which is currently very difficult. It's also much easier to > ensure the groups remain active as opposed to having to chase down each > individual maintainer listed on each package. How to ensure :) > > At the beginning it will simply transform the problem of ‘we need to > find maintainers for 2000 packages’ to ‘we need to find maintainers for > 10 groups’. Groups can then simply use the monitor to see which packages > become outdated with hopes that someone in the group makes the update. > > What do you think? I think something like this is inevitable with the > ever-growing number of packages and users or we end up with the > situation like we have today, with thousands of outdated packages > without maintainers or with inactive/busy maintainers listed. Agree. > > The changes required would be to categorise packages we have (easy, > simply go by how nixpkgs is organised), assign a group (an e-mail > address, perhaps a mailing list or something) to each and go through > each expression to add the respective group's e-mail. > > Thanks! > > Current numbers: > > Packages # > Potentially vulnerable 234 > Unmaintained not covered 1691 > Outdated unmaintained 1048 > Outdated 2143 > > > Maintainers Packages > 0 4347 > 1 2065 > 2 743 > 3 254 > 4 268 > 5 1 > > [1]: http://monitor.nixos.org > [2]: http://devmanual.gentoo.org/general-concepts/herds-and-projects/ > > -- > Mateusz K. > _______________________________________________ > nix-dev mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev _______________________________________________ nix-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev
