How can I help cleaning out nixpkgs issues and pull requests?

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Today I felt in the mood to have a look at some nixpkgs issues. I found that there were a lot of issues that might be closed. For example, they are:

  • Not actually a problem with nixpkgs. I tried to respond with a solution to the original problem, hoping that the person will then close their issue.
  • A package request from 2021 for a project that is now abandoned and superceded. I asked the person if they still need that or if they would rather use the new project.
  • A pull request draft from 2021 that could have been merged as-is back then, but the person did not switch from “draft” to an actual pull request and now it doesn’t build any more. I told them and asked if it was still relevant to them.

Am I doing this right? Is there an instruction somewhere what to do with this kind of issues?

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Just close those kinds of issues. Ping, wait a bit for a reply (a week perhaps?) and then close. We can always re-open issues and PRs should they come back a few months later; that’s not an issue.

If there’s a PR you personally need but their author has become unresponsive, feel free to take it over yourself by creating a new PR with the same commit in it (and some of your own changes on top perhaps).

If you’re willing to help weed out issues (greatly appreciated btw.) and are not part of the NixOS maintainers team yet, feel free to add yourself to the list and ping me. Once you’re in the list, ofBorg will send you an invite I believe.

See https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/3ca25cf8852f17a0d76aebdf7a507ffc8d573969/maintainers/README.md for more info.

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I go through and do this occasionally myself. No one’s bitten my head off. A very small number of issues/prs get reopened.

I don’t want to ping any ~dead issues, but if you want to get a sense of the bedside manner I’m using you can pick a few out of these searches:

(Those won’t all be ones I’ve closed, but it shouldn’t be too hard to find examples in there.)

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