2023 Summer of Nix program updates

Events Summer of Nix
12

Here’s the second progress update for Summer of Nix 2023.

The three mobs incorporated themselves as algae, moss, and fungus, and are now spreading their spores all over the new NGIpkgs monorepo as well as Nixpkgs.

Overall, participants and organisers are happy with the process. Mobs actively communicate and collaborate with project authors, and apart from the usual gripes with rough edges around Nix and Nixpkgs, we see continuous progress and working code. In particular, the mobs had to deal with Python Poetry, PHP Composer, defining NixOS service modules and deploying them to Digital Ocean, as well as NixOS VM tests. Lots of knowledge was shared, that’s for sure. There is more to come, as we also have non-trivial Rust projects on the agenda. See the issue tracker for some diligent technical reports and exchanges.

The fact that no involvement by project organisers was needed over the course of a month is testament that the combination of an initial plan and the mob format works out as intended.

More detail on what happened in the past weeks:

  • @cleeyv added continuous integration for pull requests, and helped the mobs with resolving technical issues and questions
  • The mobs refactored the repo’s flake.nix and set up automatic code formatting
  • moss mob
    • Packaged Flarum and will continue with developing a service definition once they are up to speed with NixOS tests
    • Packaged librecast and dependencies, and upstreamed them to Nixpkgs
    • Now working on openXC7 upstream with the project author
  • algae mob
  • fungus mob

To be clear, while this looks like a fairly short list, these are significant chunks of work.

Next up, @cleeyv will spend his remaining two weeks on documenting the process to deploy to cloud VMs for a smoother manual testing cycle, as well as adding documentation on how to effectively integrate NGIpkgs software into other contexts.

There is still some trouble with Darwin builds in continuous integration. Given that the services all target Linux and mobs use VMs to test them, this is not a problem for ongoing development. But that also means that it likely won’t get resolved within this year’s program time frame.

We also discussed licensing for the monorepo. A possible choice is MPL 2.0, but we’d like feedback from Nixpkgs maintainers to make sure it’s easy to upstream Summer of Nix work to Nixpkgs. If you have suggestions or feedback on that subject, please add it to the linked thread.

Providing a web front-end for the monorepo that displays all available packages and configurations in a more convenient way will almost certainly end up as a stretch goal to be covered by the remaining part of the budget for this year. For now we will focus more on substance than on appearance, simply to get more open source software into people’s hands, reproducibly.

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