Contribute to the Nix 2023 Recap

Announcements
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Happy almost 2024, Everyone!

Last year, we came together to document the milestones and triumphs of our community with a year-end recap. It wasn’t just a list but a story of the awesomeness of this community, this project and all the collaboration, innovation and growth that happened. Giving a shout out to the community and a glimpse into the amazing things happening to those who are yet to join us.

Therefore! Once again, we’re looking to showcase all the great milestones, accomplishments, moments and anything in between that happened in 2023. We need some help from everyone in order for us to have the widest and most diverse covering possible. :heart:

Please bring up your ideas and discuss the top Nix things that happened across 2023!

A few kickstart idea areas to think about and share:

Share Your Highlights: What were your favorite moments, features, or achievements in Nix this year? Did you attend a memorable Nix-related event, contribute to a project, or see a significant improvement in the tools you use?

Celebrate Community Efforts: This is also a time to highlight the contributions of our community members. Did you notice someone going above and beyond in supporting the Nix community? Let’s give them a shoutout!

Call Out Major Milestones: Were there any major releases, governance changes, community milestones, or technical breakthroughs that deserve recognition? Let’s compile them all!

What did you find most important and why? As usual, vote with your :heart:.

If there’s a PR, announcement or blog post associated with it, please also provide a link. :slightly_smiling_face:

Next Steps

We’ll use the initial items to compile a draft open doc which we will then share with anyone interested to help write up the different sections.
After that, this will turn into the Nix 2023 Recap!

@garbas / @fricklerhandwerk / @ysndr / @tomberek / @bjth / @RaitoBezarius / @domenkozar / @thufschmitt / @edolstra / @softinio / @zimbatm / @zmitchell / @Infinisil

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Summer of Nix 2023 was a precious opportunity to get paid to package open source projects using Nix in mob programming format.

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[RFC 0145] Doc-comments by @hsjobeki has been submitted and merged. Thank you, @hsjobeki and everyone involved.

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I think @Infinisil did a great job starting up the NAT and being highly involved in getting RFC140 to the finish line and getting all infrastructure in place. @vcunat did a great job keeping up with all staging cycles and investigating infrastructure issues. @K900 has been updating some core packages and seems to be pretty involved, which is great to see. @Stunkymonkey has been working a lot on small sprintable quests, which is always lovely. @trofi and @amjoseph have also been doing great infra work for cross and for the compilers, making the package definitions incrementally better, improving bootstrapping.

Thanks everyone for the great efforts (I probably forgot lots of people here). You’ve been great at being on top of cross support and keeping us the most updated and filled repository out there!

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I am just cursorily aware of the effort, but hasn’t there been lots of progress by @emilytrau on bootstrapping? (see list of closed issues)

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January: Noogle is ready for use. This tool by @hsjobeki has done wonders for the discoverability of nixpkgs as a library.

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February: The (first!) nix dev room at fosdem 2023 is packed with people, causing a long queue in the hallway outside. The interest behind the nix movement has been loudly communicated to the rest of the FOSS community.

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April: Disko 1.0.0 was released by Numtide and donated to nix-community, which helps with unattended installations and deployments. It has since seen multiple releases.

EDIT: no more than 3 consecutive replies, too bad for separate :heart: voting…

July: https://nix.dev is adopted by the documentation team and becomes official.

September: The php.buildComposerProject builder by @drupol, which solves a major roadblock in one day making Nixpkgs and Nixos become the go-to self-hosting distribution.

May and November: The ZHF campaign for Nixos 23.05 and 23.11, where a large part of the community came together to patch, fix and stabilize our packages and modules for the two releases.

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Great call outs! Keep them coming! <3

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On the NixOS Discourse instance, Arnout Engelen (@raboof) announced that NixOS have created an independent, bit-for-bit identical rebuilding of the nixos-minimal image that is used to install NixOS. In their post, Arnout details what exactly can be reproduced, and even includes some of the history of this endeavour:

You may remember a 2021 announcement that the minimal ISO was 100% reproducible. While back then we successfully tested that all packages that were needed to build the ISO were individually reproducible, actually rebuilding the ISO still introduced differences. This was due to some remaining problems in the hydra cache and the way the ISO was created. By the time we fixed those, regressions had popped up (notably an upstream problem in Python 3.10), and it isn’t until this week that we were back to having everything reproducible and being able to validate the complete chain.

Discussion about this announcement can be found underneath the post itself, as well as on Hacker News.

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My highlight has been the amazing amount of synergy on working on the core parts of NixOS which just only a few years ago were basically unmaintained due to people getting burnt out.

We now have many people working on the bootloader, initramfs, systemd, and networking stack. With great improvements in security, boot time, and maintainability. Internally at Mercury our boot times went from 30 seconds to 3 seconds due to all the work that happened on this stuff behind the scenes.

Meanwhile we have a better relationship with upstream Linux userspace community and are upstreaming more and more of our work. With my personal highlight that we were invited to the Image Based Linux Summit (a private get together of Linux distro builders) to talk about all the progress we and other distros have made together in the past year. The 2023 Image-Based Linux Summit [LWN.net]

There’s a great amount of energy and momentum at the moment to make NixOS one of the best and most secure distros out there and I’m super happy to be able to collaborate with so many smart folks.

Shout outs to @flokli @nikstur @RaitoBezarius @ElvishJerricco and everybody else in the #systemd:nixos.org channel. We’ve moved mountains this year

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Starting to take governance more serious and removing the commit bits if people don’t own there mistakes.

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It isn’t fully implemented yet, I believe most of the CLI and all of Flakes is still experimental!

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Sorry for that, it’s a mistake made by my translator, I didn’t check it strictly, I have deleted my description.

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Core geospatial software was moved under Nix Geospatial Team maintenance, more people joining the team and software maintenance is now much more consolidated then it was before.

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