2024-06-03 Nix team meeting minutes #149

Development Nix
1

Attendees: @edolstra @ericson2314 @roberth @thufschmitt

Meson

Will wait until the next release (this week)

Then either

  1. merge straight away what we have (roughly the same as Lix), or
  2. switch to subprojects, which will enable a more incremental migration

Solution 1. has the issue of potentially breaking a number of “exotic” configuration options (like cross-compilation), and makes a huge diff. Solution 2. risks having a Hadrian-like situation, but makes it easier to fix issues as they go and ensuring exhaustiveness.

Decision: Wait until end of the week to see whether we can have libutil build with subprojects. If it does, we can be confident that we can migrate the whole thing quickly and we can move to that. Otherwise, we’ll start with the monolitic part.

Next release

@edolstra will ask @fricklerhandwerk (who considered taking on maintaining the Nixpkgs package) to pair on it

New contributors

  • @ericson2314 will get in touch with @mic92 to see whether he’s interested in contributing further
  • Shall we give @abathur commit rights on the installer? He did such an amazing job there

PRs worked on or merged

2

What is meant by a “Hadrian-like situation”?

2 Likes
3

This was a reference to Hadrian, the build-system of GHC which had been introduced to replace the old Makefile-based system. It took years (5 I think) to make it feature-complete, and both build-systems cohabitated during that time, which was quite a pain.

3 Likes