I want to become a maintainer of my package

Recently I have found myself more engaged with the nixpkgs repo. Actually, one of my Python packages became available on nixpkgs but under a different maintainer. I would like to potentially contribute my other projects but also help maintain existing stuff. Do I understand correctly, that (under 1 PR if possible):

  1. In one commit, I should edit maintainer-list.nix to include myself.
  2. In another commit, I should update meta.maintainers of the related package.

I have read this and this but I want to be sure.

The burning question I have is: is it okay for me just to add myself there, or should I consult with the existing maintainer first - perhaps @pinging in the PR would be enough? Won’t making such PR straightforward come across as odd?

Talking about this specifically:

THX! :crab:

I think just making a PR adding yourself as a maintainer is okay. After all, that’s what pull requests are for - discussing the change. If existing maintainers have any concerns (I don’t think the creator of the software project being a maintainer is necessarily one), they can raise them in the PR.

2 Likes

Correct. 2 commits, 1 PR is fine.

Yes, and nixpkgs has automation to ping the existing maintainers anyway of the corresponding package. But for a change like this, that’s not really needed.

Go ahead with the PR, hopefully it’ll get merged relatively quickly. Just be aware, most maintainers don’t have merge access, so you may have to wait for a committer to pick up your PR and merge it.

1 Like

Thank you very much all :+1: