Hello everyone,
having recently started to use Nix / NixOS exclusively for my day-to-day OCaml development, I’d be interested in getting onboarded as a maintainer for the ocamlPackages set in nixpkgs.
I’m not sure where to start or who to ask, that’s why I’m posting it here.
Doesn’t look like there’s any active ocaml PRs: Pull requests · NixOS/nixpkgs · GitHub
However, going through PRs and see what other maintainers comment about PRs is a good way to see what practices are considered current. I’m not sure how active the ocaml+nixpkgs community is, but nixpkgs is always looking for more people to review PRs 
EDIT: wrong url
I have 3 OCaml PRs open: Pull requests · NixOS/nixpkgs · GitHub
I’m not sure if I should have added a label, or if I even have permissions to do so.
My goal with this request is to start adding more packages to the OCaml + Nix package collection, and keeping the ones that exist updated (I’ve been doing this in a personal overlay). I’m happy to start reviewing more PRs too.
Do you have any actionable suggestions that I could follow in the meantime? Should I just start creating PRs with the things I wish to see upstreamed? Am I just not tagging the right people to review my contributions?
My goal with this request is to start adding more packages to the OCaml + Nix package collection, and keeping the ones that exist updated (I’ve been doing this in a personal overlay).
Upstreaming from a personal overlay is how I started. Perfectly acceptable.
I’m happy to start reviewing more PRs too.
Great
Do you have any actionable suggestions that I could follow in the meantime?
Many packages reference different language frameworks for certain tooling. (E.g. python+sphinx or haskell+pandoc for doc building,) Don’t be ignorant of how other languages are packaged.
Should I just start creating PRs with the things I wish to see upstreamed?
Absolutely.
Am I just not tagging the right people to review my contributions?
There does seem to be a shortage of committers vs # of PRs, however, you don’t need commit access to do nix-review + some testing.
Good to know!
Sounds good. I’ve been looking at some other packages too, esp. the static overlay (I have interest in cross compiling to musl64).
Alright, I suppose this is all I needed to know, thanks once again.
I’m not sure what the etiquette is for asking folks to take a look, but I suppose I’ll figure it out as time goes on.
In general, someone will get a github notification if they have already participated in a thread, listed as a maintainer of the package, or a CODEOWNER of a directory. If nothing is happening for a few days, feel free to request a review from me, with exception of vacation, I’m usually fairly responsive.
I really appreciate that!
@anmonteiro Good thinking on making a post about OCaml packaging on discourse.
I’m not really aware of the contributors to OCaml in nixpkgs, but I suggest adjusting the title of this thread to attract their attention (maintaining Ocaml packages in nixos/contributing to the ocaml framework).
Best bet without me being informed could be to look at History for pkgs/top-level/ocaml-packages.nix - NixOS/nixpkgs · GitHub and ping pretty active committers (that being people who can merge changes to nixpkgs).
Great idea, I just changed the title of this post.
Sounds good. I’ll start doing that. I wasn’t sure if I should be pinging people left and right but it probably makes sense given the volume of PRs the repo gets.
My experience has been pings are pretty much welcome, and while there’s definitely people under “ping duress” they’re still probably making the best of it and can help you find ways to direct your requests for review etc.