GNOME release strategy for NixOS stable?

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Hi everybody,

Are all bugfix releases of GNOME usually backported to NixOS stable, or does NixOS stable in general stay on a release as long as nothing major breaks?

For example: will GNOME updates 2026-01-24 by bobby285271 · Pull Request #483366 · NixOS/nixpkgs · GitHub likely be backported to nixos-25.11?

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Normally, bugfix releases of all applications should be backported to the current stable branch. And that includes GNOME bugfix releases.

In this case, a day after your comment someone added the “backport” tag to the PR, so that the nixpkgs-ci bot automatically creates a PR for the backport. However, because of a merge conflict the bot did not open a PR by itself.
I now fixed the conflict and created a new PR: [Backport release-25.11] GNOME updates 2026-01-24 by axodentally · Pull Request #488388 · NixOS/nixpkgs · GitHub .
To do that, I just used the commands the bot provided, however I cherry-picked the commits one-by-one to find the one with the merge conflict and then fixed it.

hopefully it gets merged soon (feel free to add a thumbs up to the PR).

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Thank you for your efforts @axodentally. I’ve been following your backport PRs and there seems to be a shortage of reviewers. If there’s anything I can help you with please ping me. I’m not a nixpkg maintainer though. Maybe we can use PRs ready for review _ ?

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Yes, more reviewers could always be nice.

I am also quite new to the nixpkgs repo and also do not want to bug the maintainers too much. And there now is a new PR for many other Gnome changes (mutter 49.4 for example): GNOME updates 2026-02-14 by bobby285271 · Pull Request #490335 · NixOS/nixpkgs · GitHub but since the master branch had some refactoring done since the last nixos-stable release (see this commit for example: libglycin-gtk4: init (split out of libglycin) by jtojnar · Pull Request #481377 · NixOS/nixpkgs · GitHub), I do not know how to handle such a case and backport those changes.

But still, a first step would be merging the last changes. Don’t know how to get the attention of the maintainers though, without bugging them. Maybe commenting or leaving likes can help, but not sure

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I now got around to backporting the other updates as well: Backport 490335 to release 25.11 by axodentally · Pull Request #495324 · NixOS/nixpkgs · GitHub

hopefully we can merge some of those soon

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