Re: [Nix-dev] Maintainership

2014-01-29 Thread Marc Weber
And when to remove unmaintained lines? After yet another year or so?

unmaintained "git-hash" "package-name"  "2014-jan"
^^ so that you know when to remove that 
line?
 ^ you may want to catch the install by name case
^^ you cannot instert it, you have to use the git hash
before that one

Marc Weber
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Re: [Nix-dev] Maintainership

2014-01-29 Thread Vladimír Čunát

On 01/29/2014 11:28 PM, Jan Malakhovski wrote:

That's clever. And not too much pain. I could handle that in case my
package got removed.


I recommend using git "log -G regexp" to search the whole history if you 
fail to find something. Currently it's just a matter of several seconds 
on our repo and reasonable HW. With this I see little need for keeping 
those stubs (for real use one should also preserve name).


Whatever the way, we need to somehow indicate quality of the packages. 
There's lots of stuff that don't build for many months, or with security 
holes...



Vlada




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Re: [Nix-dev] Maintainership

2014-01-29 Thread Jan Malakhovski
On Wed, 29 Jan 2014 11:44:40 -0800
James Cook  wrote:

> How about deleting the expression but leaving a note about where to
> find it?  For example, in all-packages.nix:
> 
>   my_package = unmaintained "0123abcd";
> 
> and then
> 
>   $ nix-env -i my-package
>   my-package was deleted because it is unmaintained.  If you would
> like to restore it, the last commit that contained the expression was
> 0123abcd

And restoring a package would mean reverting the patch and then
fixing the expression. Also this would probably mean less merge
conflicts then rebasing my branch with reverts and fixes on top of
nixpkgs since the line with my_package would still be there and would
split any changed chunks around it.

That's clever. And not too much pain. I could handle that in case my
package got removed.

Some of the people here don't want to drag all the old broken stuff
and want to force maintainers update their stuff so that at least the
expressions evaluate, that's understandable. I fear for the
duplication of work. This 'unmaintained' derivation should make
everyone happy.

Cheers,
  Jan
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Re: [Nix-dev] Maintainership

2014-01-29 Thread James Cook
On 29 January 2014 04:32, Petr Rockai  wrote:
> Jan Malakhovski  writes:
>> * First, this "remove unmaintained" policy discourages adding new
>> packages to the public nixpkgs by users that are unable to maintain
>> stuff. In the example above, I would better store the package in my
>> own branch than risk it being unexpectedly removed. This would
>> probably imply duplication of work in case somebody else will want to
>> have it at some later point. I wouldn't search all the nixpkgs' forks
>> for a possibility that somebody already has an expression for this
>> package.
>
> It is a trade-off. Broken packages can be more overhead than duplication
> of work. If you make a package that works for you, push it to nixpkgs
> and abandon it, the next person will find it broken for his purpose, fix
> it and in the process break it for you. You will both spend time
> debugging the package. If one of the two users was a maintainer, the
> other could come to him and they can figure out something that works for
> both. If there is no maintainer and you update once in a while, you can
> end up ping-ponging fixes and counterfixes.
>
>> I would rather drop this "remove unmaintained" altogether, at least
>> for current requirements for being a maintainer (especially about the
>> "timely fashion"). Marking unmaintained (or even better: unmaintained
>> and potentially exploitable (which I would define as: it's a daemon or
>> some other package uses it)) packages broken and notifying
>> contributors about this fact looks okay.
>
> Even things that are marked as broken involve cognitive overhead when
> working on nixpkgs. They clutter up the source, often use outdated
> idioms, they hold up or complicate changes in support code. It's like a
> closet, it's hard to get at the things you actually use when it's full
> of junk.
>
> As for exploitable, that's an extremely conservative approach you
> suggest. I'm wondering if a remote code execution vulnerability in your
> browser or e-mail client is of no concern to you. :-) Or a PDF reader?
> Flash plugin? There have been countless security breaches due to bugs in
> non-daemon, leaf packages.

How about deleting the expression but leaving a note about where to
find it?  For example, in all-packages.nix:

  my_package = unmaintained "0123abcd";

and then

  $ nix-env -i my-package
  my-package was deleted because it is unmaintained.  If you would
like to restore it, the last commit that contained the expression was
0123abcd

James
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Re: [Nix-dev] Maintainership

2014-01-29 Thread Michael Raskin
>Michael Raskin <7c6f4...@mail.ru> writes:
>> Somehow, whenever updates of packages I care about were broken, it was 
>> a simple mistake that was easy to fix separately… I think this scenario 
>> is overly pessimistic.
>
>Well, depends on your point of view. If you only care about a few
>packages for your personal use, it's one thing, when you deploy an

I care about a few hundreds packages that I want to have installed,
and a few tens of them are something I use constantly.

>installation with twenty users it's entirely different. You run into the
>need to fix packages that you don't personally use or aren't very
>familiar with, and even if you figure out a fix, it is unlikely to be
>entirely correct.
>
>Being able to consult someone who understands both nix(os) *and* the
>package in question in a timely fashion would make fixing such problems
>much easier, and even somewhat less likely to be required.

Improving quality of individual packages = reducing count of packages
in the short run. So it's better to have a dump for non-Hydra-worthy 
packages…

>> In general, one can expect that the amount of time maintainers spend on
>> their packages will not change too much whatever policy change you
>> propose. There are some packages that I want to have installed but don't
>> care about versions, so the question is not whether I will maintain them
>> well but whether I will keep them in configurations/ or nixpkgs/.
>
>Well, I expect that if the tools make it easy to see whom to contact
>about a particular package, maintainers will see more engagement from
>their users. That alone can work to make them more active, and can give

Or just burn out… Hopefully only w.r.t. NixPkgs and only temporarily.

>them valuable feedback/new knowledge about how the package is/can be
>used. It also makes it less likely they break use-cases in the future if
>they are familiar with them.




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Re: [Nix-dev] Maintainership

2014-01-29 Thread Petr Rockai
Michael Raskin <7c6f4...@mail.ru> writes:
> Somehow, whenever updates of packages I care about were broken, it was 
> a simple mistake that was easy to fix separately… I think this scenario 
> is overly pessimistic.

Well, depends on your point of view. If you only care about a few
packages for your personal use, it's one thing, when you deploy an
installation with twenty users it's entirely different. You run into the
need to fix packages that you don't personally use or aren't very
familiar with, and even if you figure out a fix, it is unlikely to be
entirely correct.

Being able to consult someone who understands both nix(os) *and* the
package in question in a timely fashion would make fixing such problems
much easier, and even somewhat less likely to be required.

> In general, one can expect that the amount of time maintainers spend on
> their packages will not change too much whatever policy change you
> propose. There are some packages that I want to have installed but don't
> care about versions, so the question is not whether I will maintain them
> well but whether I will keep them in configurations/ or nixpkgs/.

Well, I expect that if the tools make it easy to see whom to contact
about a particular package, maintainers will see more engagement from
their users. That alone can work to make them more active, and can give
them valuable feedback/new knowledge about how the package is/can be
used. It also makes it less likely they break use-cases in the future if
they are familiar with them.

Of course, having nix-env or somesuch list maintainers, and making it
possible to file issues with individual packages (as opposed to just
making a generic issue in github) would help with those things as well.

Petr

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Re: [Nix-dev] Maintainership

2014-01-29 Thread Michael Raskin
>It is a trade-off. Broken packages can be more overhead than duplication
>of work. If you make a package that works for you, push it to nixpkgs
>and abandon it, the next person will find it broken for his purpose, fix
>it and in the process break it for you. You will both spend time
>debugging the package. If one of the two users was a maintainer, the
>other could come to him and they can figure out something that works for
>both. If there is no maintainer and you update once in a while, you can
>end up ping-ponging fixes and counterfixes.

Somehow, whenever updates of packages I care about were broken, it was 
a simple mistake that was easy to fix separately… I think this scenario 
is overly pessimistic.

In general, one can expect that the amount of time maintainers spend on
their packages will not change too much whatever policy change you
propose. There are some packages that I want to have installed but don't
care about versions, so the question is not whether I will maintain them
well but whether I will keep them in configurations/ or nixpkgs/.



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Re: [Nix-dev] Maintainership

2014-01-29 Thread Petr Rockai
Jan Malakhovski  writes:
> * First, this "remove unmaintained" policy discourages adding new
> packages to the public nixpkgs by users that are unable to maintain
> stuff. In the example above, I would better store the package in my
> own branch than risk it being unexpectedly removed. This would
> probably imply duplication of work in case somebody else will want to
> have it at some later point. I wouldn't search all the nixpkgs' forks
> for a possibility that somebody already has an expression for this
> package.

It is a trade-off. Broken packages can be more overhead than duplication
of work. If you make a package that works for you, push it to nixpkgs
and abandon it, the next person will find it broken for his purpose, fix
it and in the process break it for you. You will both spend time
debugging the package. If one of the two users was a maintainer, the
other could come to him and they can figure out something that works for
both. If there is no maintainer and you update once in a while, you can
end up ping-ponging fixes and counterfixes.

> I would rather drop this "remove unmaintained" altogether, at least
> for current requirements for being a maintainer (especially about the
> "timely fashion"). Marking unmaintained (or even better: unmaintained
> and potentially exploitable (which I would define as: it's a daemon or
> some other package uses it)) packages broken and notifying
> contributors about this fact looks okay.

Even things that are marked as broken involve cognitive overhead when
working on nixpkgs. They clutter up the source, often use outdated
idioms, they hold up or complicate changes in support code. It's like a
closet, it's hard to get at the things you actually use when it's full
of junk.

As for exploitable, that's an extremely conservative approach you
suggest. I'm wondering if a remote code execution vulnerability in your
browser or e-mail client is of no concern to you. :-) Or a PDF reader?
Flash plugin? There have been countless security breaches due to bugs in
non-daemon, leaf packages.

Petr

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Re: [Nix-dev] Maintainership

2014-01-29 Thread Petr Rockai
Thomas Bereknyei  writes:
> That almost sounds like an "unstable" channel.

Unstable and unmaintained are two very different things.

> Rather than removing unmaintained packages, can we make them available as 
> a
> separate, opt-in channel?

I'd say that is an option, but if the unmaintained pile contains
important software and basically everybody needs to enable it, we are
not much better off -- we'll still get a lot of breakage every time we
update the system and even up-to-date systems will likely sport many
vulnerabilities. Not everyone is happy to rely on security by obscurity
of NixOS, and if it becomes more widespread it could become an easy
attack target.

I imagine that non-NixOS installations of nixpkgs have a different set
of trade-offs though.

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Re: [Nix-dev] Maintainership

2014-01-29 Thread Marc Weber
Excerpts from Alex Berg's message of Wed Jan 29 03:57:56 +0100 2014:
> Rather than removing unmaintained packages, can we make them available as a
> separate, opt-in channel?
Then they will bitrot even faster - because you have to test much more.
It would be possible, I've been using kind of overlays for a long time
(for haskell and ruby packages packaged "my automatic style")
But also see below, git history will be available always ..

@Jan Malakhovski
>For what it worth, I think unmaintained packages should not be removed
>just for the sake of it, especially when/if their nix-expressions are
>nontrivial.
Don't forget that history will always be accessible by using git search.
But I agree that its easy to miss that. Its non trivial to estimate how
much complicated packages (let's say openoffice/libreoffice for
instance) also change while packages are broken. In the open office /
libre office case open office was broken too, but the fix was not to fix
open office but to switch to libre office.

There are so many reasons that it does make sense to remove packages
after some time (maybe 6-12 month) which is why its important to
declarate since when they were broken.

At least that's what I think.

The more interesting question is whether we should try to keep all
tarballs mirrored, so that you at least have a chance to install the old
versions which worked once .. - Again nice users statistics would help
determining which source archives to keep.

Marc Weber
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Re: [Nix-dev] Maintainership

2014-01-28 Thread Thomas Bereknyei
That almost sounds like an "unstable" channel.


On Tue, Jan 28, 2014 at 9:57 PM, Alex Berg  wrote:

> Rather than removing unmaintained packages, can we make them available as
> a separate, opt-in channel?
>  On Jan 28, 2014 6:43 PM, "Jan Malakhovski"  wrote:
>
>> On Tue, 28 Jan 2014 10:36:39 -0500
>> Shea Levy  wrote:
>>
>> > Thoughts? If we did decide this was a good idea, we should set aside
>> > some time period by which people should unmaintain packages they don't
>> > want this responsibility for and adopt packages they do.
>>
>> For what it worth, I think unmaintained packages should not be removed
>> just for the sake of it, especially when/if their nix-expressions are
>> nontrivial.
>>
>> Suppose currently I'm the only user (or even maybe "ex-user") of a
>> package, the package is some obscure userspace util and so there
>> aren't any security concerns involved, it works (or even maybe
>> "worked") for me, but I don't have any time whatsoever to maintain it.
>>
>> * First, this "remove unmaintained" policy discourages adding new
>> packages to the public nixpkgs by users that are unable to maintain
>> stuff. In the example above, I would better store the package in my
>> own branch than risk it being unexpectedly removed. This would
>> probably imply duplication of work in case somebody else will want to
>> have it at some later point. I wouldn't search all the nixpkgs' forks
>> for a possibility that somebody already has an expression for this
>> package.
>> * Second, I believe making a broken package work is usually easier
>> than writing the nix-expression from scratch. Searching repository
>> history for old removed versions of nix-expressions would be painful.
>>
>> I would rather drop this "remove unmaintained" altogether, at least
>> for current requirements for being a maintainer (especially about the
>> "timely fashion"). Marking unmaintained (or even better: unmaintained
>> and potentially exploitable (which I would define as: it's a daemon or
>> some other package uses it)) packages broken and notifying
>> contributors about this fact looks okay.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>   Jan
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>
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Re: [Nix-dev] Maintainership

2014-01-28 Thread Alex Berg
Rather than removing unmaintained packages, can we make them available as a
separate, opt-in channel?
On Jan 28, 2014 6:43 PM, "Jan Malakhovski"  wrote:

> On Tue, 28 Jan 2014 10:36:39 -0500
> Shea Levy  wrote:
>
> > Thoughts? If we did decide this was a good idea, we should set aside
> > some time period by which people should unmaintain packages they don't
> > want this responsibility for and adopt packages they do.
>
> For what it worth, I think unmaintained packages should not be removed
> just for the sake of it, especially when/if their nix-expressions are
> nontrivial.
>
> Suppose currently I'm the only user (or even maybe "ex-user") of a
> package, the package is some obscure userspace util and so there
> aren't any security concerns involved, it works (or even maybe
> "worked") for me, but I don't have any time whatsoever to maintain it.
>
> * First, this "remove unmaintained" policy discourages adding new
> packages to the public nixpkgs by users that are unable to maintain
> stuff. In the example above, I would better store the package in my
> own branch than risk it being unexpectedly removed. This would
> probably imply duplication of work in case somebody else will want to
> have it at some later point. I wouldn't search all the nixpkgs' forks
> for a possibility that somebody already has an expression for this
> package.
> * Second, I believe making a broken package work is usually easier
> than writing the nix-expression from scratch. Searching repository
> history for old removed versions of nix-expressions would be painful.
>
> I would rather drop this "remove unmaintained" altogether, at least
> for current requirements for being a maintainer (especially about the
> "timely fashion"). Marking unmaintained (or even better: unmaintained
> and potentially exploitable (which I would define as: it's a daemon or
> some other package uses it)) packages broken and notifying
> contributors about this fact looks okay.
>
> Cheers,
>   Jan
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Re: [Nix-dev] Maintainership

2014-01-28 Thread Jan Malakhovski
On Tue, 28 Jan 2014 10:36:39 -0500
Shea Levy  wrote:

> Thoughts? If we did decide this was a good idea, we should set aside
> some time period by which people should unmaintain packages they don't
> want this responsibility for and adopt packages they do.

For what it worth, I think unmaintained packages should not be removed
just for the sake of it, especially when/if their nix-expressions are
nontrivial.

Suppose currently I'm the only user (or even maybe "ex-user") of a
package, the package is some obscure userspace util and so there
aren't any security concerns involved, it works (or even maybe
"worked") for me, but I don't have any time whatsoever to maintain it.

* First, this "remove unmaintained" policy discourages adding new
packages to the public nixpkgs by users that are unable to maintain
stuff. In the example above, I would better store the package in my
own branch than risk it being unexpectedly removed. This would
probably imply duplication of work in case somebody else will want to
have it at some later point. I wouldn't search all the nixpkgs' forks
for a possibility that somebody already has an expression for this
package.
* Second, I believe making a broken package work is usually easier
than writing the nix-expression from scratch. Searching repository
history for old removed versions of nix-expressions would be painful.

I would rather drop this "remove unmaintained" altogether, at least
for current requirements for being a maintainer (especially about the
"timely fashion"). Marking unmaintained (or even better: unmaintained
and potentially exploitable (which I would define as: it's a daemon or
some other package uses it)) packages broken and notifying
contributors about this fact looks okay.

Cheers,
  Jan
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Re: [Nix-dev] Maintainership

2014-01-28 Thread Pascal Wittmann
On 01/28/2014 04:36 PM, Shea Levy wrote:
> Thoughts? If we did decide this was a good idea, we should set aside
> some time period by which people should unmaintain packages they don't
> want this responsibility for and adopt packages they do.

I like your ideas and think that they will help to create a more
reliable list of packages. I for one stumbled upon some broken but
maintained packages when trying to install them (often without time to
fix them or motivation to create an issue). I find this somehow more
frustrating as if the package is not there at all or marked as broken.

Pascal



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Re: [Nix-dev] Maintainership

2014-01-28 Thread Marc Weber
Excerpts from Eelco Dolstra's message of Tue Jan 28 18:21:57 +0100 2014:
> It should be possible (if somewhat tricky) to gather this information from the
> logs of cache.nixos.org (at least for those packages that are actually in the
> cache).
You'll get cache hits for "trying packages" - but we need hits for
"usages". But you're right that that could be a starting point, too.

I just think that its very important to understand what gets used, too.

About debian and dropping: Right, If something does not work it should
be dropped. I just think its nice to have some guaranteed time to fix as
well as some hints that packages are broken. Whether a package gets
removed 3 month earlier/later doesn't matter as long as it gets masked
and then removed.

Marc Weber
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Re: [Nix-dev] Maintainership

2014-01-28 Thread Vladimír Čunát

On 01/28/2014 06:12 PM, Stewart Mackenzie wrote:

Might we adopt the C4 approach used in zeromq? It was created by Pietor 
Hintjens.

We're using it os the Mozart Oz project and numenta/nupic to great success.

Please consider it.
Kind regards
Stewart


I don't understand much, and I think it was meant for the list, not myself.




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Re: [Nix-dev] Maintainership

2014-01-28 Thread Eelco Dolstra
Hi,

On 28/01/14 18:08, Oliver Charles wrote:

>> * If a package is unmaintained, it can be removed with minimal notice.
>>   This will require some time under the new idea of maintainership
>>   before it can be fairly put into place, but Eelco had the suggestion
>>   that no maintainers could be treated equivalently to meta.broken =
>>   true.
> 
> In Debian, I would imagine they can make use of the popularity contest
> or whatever it is to see if people are even using this. Is it worth that
> we consider having the ability to gather metrics like that? 

It should be possible (if somewhat tricky) to gather this information from the
logs of cache.nixos.org (at least for those packages that are actually in the
cache).

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Re: [Nix-dev] Maintainership

2014-01-28 Thread Marc Weber
Excerpts from Shea Levy's message of Tue Jan 28 16:36:39 +0100 2014:
> Thoughts?
I'd try such:
1) replace broken = true by broken_since="date";
  (Even maintained packages can be broken - and if they don't get fixed
  within 3-6 month they can be "unmaintained" this way.

2) send reminder to use the script to upload app usages (maybe quartely
  by mailinglist)

3) one month after the reminder was sent packages which are still
  broken and were broken for more than a month.

Think about whether unused (but non broken) packages should be removed,
too.

Thus I'd send the maintainers a list of packages they maintain once a
year, too. Then they can think about which ones to drop eventually.

Its hard to define "high quality" - eg do we expect maintainers to
review code, too? ...

Maybe it does make sense to think about having different maintainance
modes such as:

  - important - people depend on it - issues will be fixed fast and
updates will be made, too?

  - not important, will be fixed if there is time.

The real solution is to start a repository about source versions so
that maintainers can upload references to their source tarballs with
changelog - also introducing flags such as [this new version fixes a
security issue] - then maintainers (also from other distros) could be
notified automatically rather than thinking that maintainers will poll
homepages regularly .. (which I don't do for most packages I created
once)..

Marc Weber
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Re: [Nix-dev] Maintainership

2014-01-28 Thread Petr Rockai
Oliver Charles  writes:

>> * If a package is unmaintained, it can be removed with minimal notice.
>>   This will require some time under the new idea of maintainership
>>   before it can be fairly put into place, but Eelco had the suggestion
>>   that no maintainers could be treated equivalently to meta.broken =
>>   true.
>
> In Debian, I would imagine they can make use of the popularity contest
> or whatever it is to see if people are even using this. Is it worth that
> we consider having the ability to gather metrics like that? Removing
> things from our package database should be more conscious than "is this
> supported" and should really be considering "do people need this?".

Even Debian removes packages that people need if none of those people
are willing or able to maintain them. Packages are a liability,
especially when they are left to rot. And I'm sure it's pretty hard to
come up with a package that many people want but none can maintain.

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Re: [Nix-dev] Maintainership

2014-01-28 Thread Oliver Charles
Shea Levy  writes:

> * If a package is unmaintained, it can be removed with minimal notice.
>   This will require some time under the new idea of maintainership
>   before it can be fairly put into place, but Eelco had the suggestion
>   that no maintainers could be treated equivalently to meta.broken =
>   true.

In Debian, I would imagine they can make use of the popularity contest
or whatever it is to see if people are even using this. Is it worth that
we consider having the ability to gather metrics like that? Removing
things from our package database should be more conscious than "is this
supported" and should really be considering "do people need this?".

> * Maintainers should respond to emails, issues, and pull requests about
>   their package in a timely fashion (even if just with WONTFIX)
> * Maintainers should at a minimum keep track of security updates for
>   their packages
> * If a change elsewhere breaks a maintained package in a non-obvious
>   way, the maintainers should make a reasonable effort to fix the
>   breakage in a timely fashion
> * Ideally maintainers would test their maintained packages on the
>   release branch(es) and master with regular frequency (most ideally by
>   using them as a user)
> * In most cases, maintainers should keep track of all new releases and
>   update when available. In the case where a particular maintainer only
>   wants to care about a specific version and that version is currently
>   the latest, it would be appreciated if they could let the community
>   know when a newer version is available so that someone else can step
>   up
> * We should devise a way of denoting maintainers for NixOS modules and
>   adopt similar policies there. Absent that, it would be nice if
>   maintainers for a package also took care of the modules for that
>   package where applicable
>
> Thoughts? If we did decide this was a good idea, we should set aside
> some time period by which people should unmaintain packages they don't
> want this responsibility for and adopt packages they do.

These all sound reasonable - and I think I manage to do most of these
myself. Most of the packages I'm a maintainer for are packages I
actively use and am interested in the development of, so I am OK with
having to keep things up to date. So yes, I agree with all of these
points.

- ocharles
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Re: [Nix-dev] Maintainership

2014-01-28 Thread Vladimír Čunát

On 01/28/2014 04:36 PM, Shea Levy wrote:

Thoughts?


Brokenness should be per-platform, as it's been introduced recently 
(meta.broken meaning that no platform is known to work). Thus, for 
maintained packages there should be platforms set, so we have at least 
"build" status and users have binaries for some default config (this 
finds much of errors introduced by dependencies).



Vlada




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Re: [Nix-dev] Maintainership

2014-01-28 Thread Petr Rockai
Hi,

I agree with basically everything said, and I think "breaking" packages
with no maintainers (after the next stable branch-off, 14.0x?) would be
really good to make it obvious what is broken and is a candidate for
removal. It would also give people a chance to adopt a package they use
before it is removed.

Shea Levy  writes:
> * If a change elsewhere breaks a maintained package in a non-obvious
>   way, the maintainers should make a reasonable effort to fix the
>   breakage in a timely fashion

I'd say that maintainers of things (packages) with reverse dependencies
should also try to help out their dependees when they do bumps likely to
break downstream packages. At least by scheduling such bumps at times
when they are going to be available for consulting, if nothing else.

Petr

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