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 <[email protected]> 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 When I first started using NixOS the tor package was way out of date 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. > > _______________________________________________ > > 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 >
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