How is the Nix project governed?

fricklerhandwerk · January 2, 2020, 4:59pm

After using nix and NixOS on a daily basis, following issues on GitHub and trying to contribute to home-manager for more than half a year, I still only have a vague idea on how the project ecosystem is managed at a higher abstraction level.

To name a few concrete questions:

How are strategy and milestones defined?
How are issues and pull requests prioritized?
What is the policy to give write access to contributors?

I am aware of the RFC process, but as for all pull requests it is not immediately obvious, judging from GitHub organization members, who can actually merge something.

Just today I accidentally learned by browsing around, that the RFC committee posts their meeting notes - yay!

FRidh · January 2, 2020, 5:16pm

How are strategy and milestones defined?

These are up to the individual community members. There is no joint strategy, although we do have RFC’s as you discovered.

How are issues and pull requests prioritized?

That’s also up to the individual community members. There are no rules regarding prioritization.

What is the policy to give write access to contributors?

There is nothing formal here. See also New nixpkgs committers requests · Issue #50105 · NixOS/nixpkgs · GitHub.

Note home-manager is a separate project.

fricklerhandwerk · January 2, 2020, 8:16pm

Thank you for the hint, the read was lengthy but somewhat enlightening.

Obviously. I just tried to point out that I came across some reasonable amount of NixOS development through home-manager, as debugging necessarily leads you down nixpkgs rabbit holes. Also it is a notable nix project and has many similarities to NixOS, being sort of a NixOS in userland.

fricklerhandwerk · January 19, 2025, 7:18pm

Five years down the road, this question is finally answered!

github.com

NixOS/org/blob/0fde9a99c08e41873d1a0f2ab489e363029863c3/doc/governance.md

# Governance

The [Nix Community Values](./values.md) and the [Nix Governance Constitution](./constitution.md) are important documents tracked in this repository.
The latter describes Steering Committee (SC) and the NixOS Foundation Board.
The [first election](https://github.com/nixos/SC-election-2024) ran in 2024.

The current SC consists of these members:
- [@Ericson2314](https://github.com/Ericson2314) (term ends 2026)
- [@fpletz](https://github.com/fpletz) (term ends 2025)
- [@Gabriella439](https://github.com/Gabriella439) (term ends 2026)
- [@jtojnar](https://github.com/jtojnar) (term ends 2026)
- [@roberth](https://github.com/roberth) (term ends 2026)
- [@tomberek](https://github.com/tomberek) (term ends 2025)
- [@winterqt](https://github.com/winterqt) (term ends 2025)

## RFC Process

The Nix RFC (Request For Comments) process exists to establish wider consensus for substantial changes. See the [rfcs repository](https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs) for more information.

## Teams

This file has been truncated. show original

Open source in a nutshell: Found a problem. Took 5 years to figure it out. At least it was possible.

numinit · January 19, 2025, 10:27pm

wisdom_of_the_ancients

source

djacu · January 19, 2025, 11:16pm

Can we create a custom badge for @fricklerhandwerk ?
*Edit: except make it gold tier.