[Nix-dev] Keeping nixpkgs up to date

[Roger Qiu]

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 When I first started using NixOS the tor package was way out of date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.
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