Community Team Updates

Announcements
1

Subject: Community Team Updates – Request for Status, Blockers, and Proposals

Hello Nix Community!

As part of our initial effort to better understand the current situation, the Steering Committee (SC) would like to invite the various parts of the community to provide an update. This thread is meant to become a place for a fairly comprehensive update about the current state of the community. This would help get everyone up to speed about the community status, provide a chance to communicate with the broader community, help us prioritize issues, and establish a budget; we’d appreciate an initial round of updates on:

  1. Current Status — Key accomplishments, ongoing projects, and recent progress, current issues.
  2. People — Identifying people responsible for various areas and/or interested to contribute. Any areas where we are lacking and need help.
  3. Blockers or Challenges — Any issues or resource needs for additional support, feedback, or decision by the SC.
  4. Upcoming Topics or Projects — Any upcoming work that requires broader community collaboration or attention from the SC.
  5. Budget issues - Any expectations or requests regarding team/project budgets.

What

To make this more actionable, here are some specific areas of interest for each team, but is not a comprehensive nor exhaustive list. Please try to consolidate with others working on similar issues to increase the signal/reduce the noise. (Specific names are only to ping people suspected to be involved+interested, not mean to be exclusive.) Going forward, we’d like to reduce the need for this sort mass-request and streamline the process if possible, include any recommendations for that as well.

These are the topics where we need more information, but your scope is not limited to these.

How

Share your updates in this thread if possible — very likely others are also interested in the responses and updates. Thanks to each of you for your continued dedication to the Nix ecosystem — your hard work makes all the difference!

To keep things on-topic, please do not enter discussion about the topics here, but break those into separate threads with the relevant teams. Consolidate with each other if possible.

After someone from your team has given a response, we will start to schedule a meeting with each team to discuss further with ~2 SC members in each meeting. (We’re trying to strike a balance between scheduling meetings in parallel, and multiple SC members in each meeting so we don’t have a single point of failure.)

Contacts

  • steering@nixos.org
  • Feel free to contact the SC individually on Matrix, Zulip, Discourse, etc. for matters that warrant it.

Looking forward to your updates!

Best,
The Nix Steering Committee

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4

Xen Team:

TL;DR: We’d like a @nixos.org email to apply for their pre-disclosure list. Everything else has been going smoothly, and we’re collaborating with upstream to get NixOS featured on their website. We will continue developing Xen on NixOS 25.05 and above.

Details:

Current Status

The Xen Project Hypervisor has been fixed up in Nixpkgs during the second half of this year, making this team the fourth youngest team in Nixpkgs at this point. We’ve been successful in booting a Xen-capable NixOS installation in x86 systems, and have diligently patched every security issue reported by upstream.

Since our announcement in Discourse, everything has been going well, to the point where upstream Xen has approached us for a collaboration in a marketing endeavour, where NixOS will be featured in the Xen Project’s new website in a few months from now. This collaboration has been orchestrated with the Marketing Team, and no further action is needed for it.

Our main blocker lies in our ability to respond to security advisories issued by upstream. While the we have taken no longer than a day to patch security issues thus far, we recognise that joining Xen’s security pre-disclosure list would further improve our reaction time to security issues. More information on that blocker is listed under Blockers or Challenges.

Blockers or Challenges

As mentioned in Current Status, we would like to apply for Xen’s security pre-disclosure list so we can be ready when security issues are discovered and get them to users as soon as possible. Unlike the distros list, we have already been informally invited by upstream to apply to their list, and I have made all of the necessary preparations for our initial application. To go ahead with this plan, we will need:

  1. An e-mail alias that ends in @nixos.org;
  2. Approval from the Steering Committee.

Everything else (The PGP key, the application message, and the website team page update) has been prepared and awaits a review from the Committee. We only need an official NixOS address, which the Infrastructure team will be able to help us with.

Upcoming Topics or Projects

We don’t expect to need direct intervention from the Steering Committee in our immediate technical projects. That said, Yaroslav has been working on a collaboration with Qubes OS; in the future, that may require the Committee’s attention, but there are no actionable requests yet.

People

The Xen team is comprised of myself, Yaroslav and Hongbo. Emily has been instrumental in reviewing and merging our PRs as well.
To resolve the security blocker mentioned above, we will also need help from the Infrastructure team.

Budget

We have no direct expenditures, so we do not need a budget at this time. There may be monetary concerns with providing the aforementioned e-mail alias, however. (I’m not sure how full the alias list is.)

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