[Nix-dev] Implement a process for maintaining simple package updates?

[Matthias Beyer]

Hi,

so, as we/you people at FOSDEM discuss about maintaining and PRs right 
now, I have a suggestion:

I would like to ask whether it would be of any help if someone (for 
example me) would take all package-update PRs and cherry-pick these 
commits on a "package-update" branch which gets merged every... 7 days 
for example?

The basic process would be:

    1. Scan the open PRs (has to be done manually, @-pinging would be 
    a way to help here) for simple package updates.
    I'm talking about _really_ simple package updates here. Only the 
    version number/hash updated or such things.

    2. Cherry-pick the commits to a branch "package-updates", close 
    the PR for it.

    3. every Saturday I @ping the maintainers of the respective 
    packages to test the update in a PR to merge the package-updates 
    branch into master

    4. Sundays my PR gets merged into master

This process would slow down the package updates to 7 days maximum, 
but as nixos-unstable gets updated slower most of the time, this 
shouldn't be _that_ much of an issue, right?

Limits:

I would limit this process to only the basic updates. No 
security-relevant things, no package updates that introduce new stuff 
in the package definition (maybe I would accept new dependencies, but 
no changed build process or something).

How do you feel about this? We could do it as experiment, I would 
report to this mailinglist every 7 days, so we can somewhat monitor 
the idea...

Also, as I have expressed elsewhere, I don't want push-access for 
nixpkgs. If such an process gets implemented, I still don't want push 
access and would ping some core-maintainer to do the merge then.

-- 
Mit freundlichen Grüßen,
Kind regards,
Matthias Beyer

Consider switching to free software.
It adds value to your life.
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