Hello everyone, and welcome to Summer of Nix 2024!
My name is Valentin, and together with @mightyiam I organise the fourth edition of the northern-hemisphere summer program on behalf of the NixOS Foundation. Summer of Nix is a coordinated effort to support selected free and open source software (FOSS) projects, by making them available as Nix packages or NixOS service modules. It is funded by the European Commission’s Next Generation Internet (NGI) initiative through the NLNet Foundation and the NixOS Foundation, this year with 135 000 EUR available for development.
Our mission is, as codified in our latest grant agreement with the European Commission:
Cross-platform reproducible packaging & distribution (NixOS)
To onboard new developers, service providers and end users, projects need both an up-to-date development & testing environment as well as turn-key software packages for deployment. We are unique in providing a common packaging solution based on Nix - across all previous and ongoing NGI Zero programmes and available to all other NGI programmes courtesy of the ongoing CSA NGI Zero Review. Nix is the next-generation vendor-agnostic package solution - one shared and reliable way of delivering software for Linux, Mac OS X and other Unix systems. Nix makes package management not only portable, transparent and reproducible – it has in fact more software packaged than any other software distribution in the world. We package all funded projects in a declarative, transparent and verifiable way. NGI Zero and the Nix community will also help organise three editions of the Summer of Nix. With Nix packaging applied horizontally across all NGI Zero programmes, this common packaging approach offers a smooth and efficient pathway to deployment.
More information on Summer of Nix and its role in the European Commission’s NGI program as well as last year’s proceedings can be found in the 2023 Summer of Nix thread. You can browse the reports from 2021, 2022, and 2023 and this year’s call for participants for details if you’re curious.
Goals
In the following months we’ll pursue the following goals:
- Display all available packages, services, and usage examples from the collection of projects supported by NLnet on the web (preview)
- Migrate existing standalone packages into either Nixpkgs or the NGIpkgs monorepo to them under CI, increase code quality, test coverage, and consumer convenience
- Add more packages, prioritising EDA (open hardware design) tools, federated social media, and service self-hosting facilities
- Finish ongoing work started last year
Team
The application process has concluded mid May, with each team lead receiving around 70 applications. Thanks to everyone who got in touch, we had many more great candidates than could be accommodated!
This year’s team leads @Janik @jleightcap @JulienMalka selected a total of 12 participants from across the globe, who will soon get together to work on getting ever more software to run on a whim, and share knowledge on disciplined software development with Nix. @mightyiam has already been at it for a month with another 6 people working in two groups. In the past weeks, @lorenzleutgeb @erethon @wegank have been taking care of infrastructure, code organisation, and contributor documentation, to make it a smooth experience for this year’s participants and future contributors. I’ll be around to answer questions, support the group on administrative matters, and provide technical direction where needed.
Stay up to date
I will post (roughly) monthly updates in this thread. If you have any questions, feel free to ask them here or contact me in private messages.
Have a great Summer of Nix!