Modular Services meeting #8 2026-09-04

Eveeifyeve · September 4, 2026, 6:01pm

Modular Services meeting #8 2026-09-04

Attendees: @KiaraGrouwstra @eveeifyeve @roberth

Status update
- @Kiara: have held back because I wasn’t certain which repo to use
- @Kiara: I think we could draw up a list of environments to target, so that we can experiment with the interface and see what makes sense
- @eveeifyeve: would like to collaborate on the user/identity feature
- @eveeifyeve: blocks directory allocation
- @roberth: made the document with design principles, based on a data dump of our discussions
Scope
- @eveeifyeve: would like to open an issue about secrets management
- @roberth: @Kiara brought up earlier: utils: init genSecretsReplacement by ibizaman · Pull Request #503858 · NixOS/nixpkgs · GitHub
  I think that mechanism could be generally useful
- @eveeifyeve: LoadCredential is getting popular, would be good to have this in the portable options
- @Kiara: also Contract for files containing secrets by ibizaman · Pull Request #495303 · NixOS/nixpkgs · GitHub
  contracts: response type and request type
  this PR inlines the contracts framing, but when viewed as contracts is not NixOS-specific
@Kiara: let’s assemble a list of frameworks
- List of frameworks with indicating inclusion in modular-services (fast moving) repo today
  - process-compose
    - prior art: process-compose-flake - flake-parts
  - devenv
  - arion
  - NixOS
  - finix
  - Home Manager
  - Nix BSD
  - Nix Darwin
  - OCI
  - Nimi
  - Microsoft Windows
  - system-manager
  - systemd --user mutable
- @eveeifyeve: propose to create options shared by finit configuration managers or systemd configuration managers. Sets of e.g. systemd options shouldn’t drift
@KiaraGrouwstra: how do we make the modular services repo include package modules functionality
- @eveeifyeve: there’s work to do
- @roberth: needs a solution of feature checking/negotiation
- @eveeifyeve: hydra?
  - @Kiara: i’d rather have CI-level latency rather than things being run once a day
- @Kiara: if this is a refactoring experiment, we don’t need users cuz CI can verify expected output for us
Tasking
- @roberth: work on users support in modular-services repo
- @eveeifyeve: continues to work on finix modular services, working on compliance suite support

Notes:

There is a more updated list available here If there is something missing, please comment on the issue there.

bitbloxhub · September 4, 2026, 7:07pm

No Tilt on the list? I use it with a bunch of local_resource declarations for most of my personal projects that require running processes in the background.

I suppose this would have to be separate from the main Tilt project, but would probably be nice to have. Nowhere near the most important framework to support, though.

kiara · September 4, 2026, 7:30pm

didn’t know this one, but i think non-traditional consumers seem like they would add valuable perspectives for our design decisions, so i added it to our list of potential candidates - thanks.