How is the Nix project governed?

Development
1

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!

2 Likes
2

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.

1 Like
3

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.

1 Like