Are packages in nixpkgs.git updated automatically or manually?

Help
1

I was wondering how packages are generally updated in nixpkgs.
Since most of them are just calls to fetchFromGit it would be relatively easy to have a mechanism that automatically creates a pull request whenever a new release is tagged.

I do a lot of scala coding and the community there has developed a github bot which automatically updates libraries in most major open source libraries. GitHub - scala-steward-org/scala-steward: A bot that helps you keep your Scala projects up-to-date
In a library I maintain it has been combined with a bot that automatically merges the PR if there are no conflicts and all tests have passed.

Is there such a process in the nix ecosystem?

2 Likes
2

The answer is both. There’s nixpkgs-update bot and maybe even others I am not aware of.

2 Likes
3

the bot will just create a PR, there’s still a human which needs to merge.

Unattended automatic updates is a good way to get malicious code in your repository, so they are semi-automatic.

3 Likes
4

Yeah, even in our case PR’s still have to be approved by a maintainer before being merged.

Thanks a lot for your answers btw :slight_smile: