2023-04-03 Nix team meeting minutes #46

fricklerhandwerk · April 5, 2023, 11:06am

Agenda

@thufschmitt reports from installer workgroup
- proposal: try a modified DetSys installer as an experiment
  - needs a few changes
  - not clear yet who would do the job
- options:
  - give green light and support for upstream PRs
  - make it our own priority (would imply dropping others)
  - call for contributors (continuation or successor to the installer workgroup)
@fricklerhandwerk: actionable next steps?
- @fricklerhandwerk: look at the source together
  - @ericson2314: should be a PR before we review anything
- @edolstra: gather more experience with new users
- @thufschmitt: make it an official experiment
decisions:
- we agree to make it an official experiment, and put it out as an alternative installer, without guarantees
  - the official experiment requires:
    - Experimental features disabled by default
    - Telemetry disabled by default or taken out altogether
    - The source living in a NixOS GitHub org repo with designated maintainers
    - Fixes from the DetSys installer are upstreamed into the NixOS org version during the experiment
      - if only one intaller is properly maintained during the experiment we won’t have a good basis to evaluate afterwards
- we will come back to reviewing the actual code and making decisions on upstreaming based on the experiment’s results after two months after it begins
  - we will consider bug reports and download counts to make the assessment

@ericson2314 has learned of a new improved “raw pattern” that addresses the issues raised (verbosity, leaking names). Hopefully we can agree on it, and then he’ll convert all the existing ones to match it.
- Reconsider `Raw` pattern · Issue #7479 · NixOS/nix · GitHub
@edolstra: LGTM
idea approved
@ericson2314 will do refactorings based on the idea

@edolstra: increasing test coverage is great, but not sure if it should be a priority over improvements
- only improvements bring new users
- @fricklerhandwerk: we may want to ask ourselves if more new users is our primary goal. more contributors, and most importantly maintainers, are what needed to keep making improvements in the long run
  - well-factored code and robust tests ease the way in for contributors
- @thufschmitt: the rules are supposed to be somewhat flexible anyway
agreement: merge

blaggacao · April 16, 2023, 3:58am

Since subflake locking is such a long running issue, I’d appreciate consideration of this work-around in the mean time.