# NixOS & Github - Collaboration!
**URL:** https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nixos-github-collaboration/23432
**Category:** Announcements
**Created:** [November 23, 2022, 4:31pm UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nixos-github-collaboration/23432 "2022-11-23T16:31:01Z")
**Posts on this page:** 15
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@ron](https://discourse.nixos.org/u/ron)
#### Post date: [November 23, 2022, 4:31pm UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nixos-github-collaboration/23432/1 "2022-11-23T16:31:01Z")
Starting with the announcement made by Github about nixpkgs being #7 - [Another Moment of Awesome - nixpkgs top 10 - NixOS Discourse](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/another-moment-of-awesome-nixpkgs-top-10/23150)
We kicked off an effort to create a relationship between Github and NixOS. Big thanks to Martin Woodward (VP of Devrel @ Github) and Abigail Cabunoc Mayes (OS Maintainer Program & OS Foundations @ Github) who quickly responded!
**TL;DR - There is now a structured channel of collaboration and comms between Github and NixOS. Github will help us as we grow across a few areas. We will have a quarterly sync where we will explore opportunities and share feedback from the NixOS community.**
If anyone has thoughts, ideas, missing features or general feedback that we can bring forward in our talks with the Github team, please add them here → [Github Request List - Feedback/Issues/Features · Issue #25 · NixOS/nixos-foundation](https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-foundation/issues/25)
## Kickoff Call Notes - November 21 2022
**Attendees**
Github - Martin Woodward, Abigail Cabunoc Mayes
NixOS - Théophane Hufschmitt (@thufschmitt), Ron Efroni Rotman (@ron), Eelco Dolstra (@edolstra), Armijn Hemel (@armijn)
### Quick Intro to Nix with Github - Tell us about NixOS - what are your priorities? What challenges do you face today?
- Nix and NixOS
- Nix - redefines how we go about building code (storing / tracking / connecting/ building). Nix packages, worlds largest & freshest package repository.
- Benefits: environment space (dependency graph)
- Ron will send over survey results → [2022 Nix Survey Results - Announcements - NixOS Discourse](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/2022-nix-survey-results/18983)
- Eelco’s PhD thesis (recommend the first few chapters!): [https://edolstra.github.io/pubs/phd-thesis.pdf](https://edolstra.github.io/pubs/phd-thesis.pdf)
### Why is it growing?
- It’s easy to contribute relative to other packages repositories.
- Comparison of all package repositories and Nix [Graphs - Repology](https://repology.org/repositories/graphs)
- Similar to Homebrew on the mac side.
- Nix is celebrating 20 years (in 2.5 months)!!
- Nix started slightly before containers. Then containers came in, code is more complex, this brings people back to help people “do it right from the get go”. People recognize the value.
- Martin: perhaps people are more aware of the size of the containers they’re deploying.
- Nix gives you a reproducible graph of build steps, if you want to change something you can
### How can GitHub best support your work?
- Common best practices & opportunities - Explored ideas from the Github side
- Being able to structure a relationship
- How do we stay in touch?
- 8am PT usually works - schedule something for Jan
- Rate limits / throttling / merge queue / access to early features and functionalities
- Open source Friday
- Changelog - introductions
- Would be inviting you to submit to conferences (like Universe, Maintainer Summit)
- How do we help other maintainers learn from the successes you’ve had? (Maintainer Summit)
### Recent / Upcoming releases that may be of interest
- [Codespaces](https://github.com/features/codespaces) 60 hrs / month free
- [Copilot referencing public code](https://github.blog/2022-11-01-preview-referencing-public-code-in-github-copilot/)
- [GitHub Fund / GitHub Accelerator](https://github.blog/2022-11-09-an-open-source-economy-built-by-developers-for-developers/)
### Anything else?
- Sponsors
- Currently on OC - sponsor students in “summer of Nix”. ~40 students.
- Nix - new feature, download Nix packages directly from GitHub
- Invite Mike Mcquaid to the next call
Quick thanks to @andir as well for sharing ideas and topics.
---
### Author:  [@Solene](https://discourse.nixos.org/u/Solene)
#### Post date: [November 23, 2022, 4:54pm UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nixos-github-collaboration/23432/2 "2022-11-23T16:54:08Z")
Awesome!
I don’t know if it’s the right place to report, but [https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pulse/monthly](https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pulse/monthly) is broken on nixpkgs, certainly because there is too much activity 😅
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### Author:  [@ron](https://discourse.nixos.org/u/ron)
#### Post date: [November 23, 2022, 4:55pm UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nixos-github-collaboration/23432/3 "2022-11-23T16:55:15Z")
It’s fine here!
I’ll also look to create a spot in our github 😅 to log these things as we collect and communicate with the team there as well.
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### Author:  [@NobbZ](https://discourse.nixos.org/u/NobbZ)
#### Post date: [November 23, 2022, 5:15pm UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nixos-github-collaboration/23432/4 "2022-11-23T17:15:27Z")
I see the rainbow unicorn there…
“Page is taking to long to load” or something…
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### Author:  [@Solene](https://discourse.nixos.org/u/Solene)
#### Post date: [November 23, 2022, 5:16pm UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nixos-github-collaboration/23432/5 "2022-11-23T17:16:14Z")
I also get the unicorn, it certainly either timeout or use too much resources 😅
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### Author:  [@Infinisil](https://discourse.nixos.org/u/Infinisil)
#### Post date: [November 23, 2022, 5:19pm UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nixos-github-collaboration/23432/6 "2022-11-23T17:19:28Z")
An interesting avenue with great benefit to both Nix and GitHub is to add some built-in Nix support to the GitHub Action runners. Eg. if GitHub Action runners had access to some per-datacenter Nix store cache, it could speed up CI considerably for Nix users and use way less network resources for GitHub. This idea can be extended to also providing e.g. a builtin per-user writable Nix store cache.
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### Author:  [@piegames](https://discourse.nixos.org/u/piegames)
#### Post date: [November 23, 2022, 5:21pm UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nixos-github-collaboration/23432/7 "2022-11-23T17:21:24Z")
My current pet peeve with GitHub is the CODEOWNERS feature. They already added some linting which is good, but for it to be truly usable in nixpkgs they’d need to drop the requirement that only people/teams with write access can become code owner.
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### Author:  [@Infinisil](https://discourse.nixos.org/u/Infinisil)
#### Post date: [November 23, 2022, 5:25pm UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nixos-github-collaboration/23432/8 "2022-11-23T17:25:15Z")
Something else I’d love to see is `kvm` support in GitHub Actions, reported by @grahamc some time ago: [Revisiting KVM support for Hosted GitHub Actions · community · Discussion #8305 · GitHub](https://github.com/community/community/discussions/8305). If this was supported it would enable Nix projects to easily run NixOS tests within GitHub Actions.
---
### Author:  [@7c6f434c](https://discourse.nixos.org/u/7c6f434c)
#### Post date: [November 23, 2022, 7:19pm UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nixos-github-collaboration/23432/9 "2022-11-23T19:19:19Z")
For a large PR discussion it is non-trivial just to get all the comments on the single page, resolved, unresolved, code comments, discussion comments, without cutting in the middle — say, to search a statement you vaguely remember. Is improving the situation around this a complete non-starter?
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### Author:  [@blaggacao](https://discourse.nixos.org/u/blaggacao)
#### Post date: [November 23, 2022, 8:28pm UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nixos-github-collaboration/23432/10 "2022-11-23T20:28:19Z")
Once we finally get Nix support into OCI, it would be great if GHCR could support that as one of the first registries.
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### Author:  [@ron](https://discourse.nixos.org/u/ron)
#### Post date: [November 23, 2022, 11:41pm UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nixos-github-collaboration/23432/11 "2022-11-23T23:41:45Z")
Added a thread to our NixOS github, please add all items there so we can track/discuss → [Github Request List - Feedback/Issues/Features · Issue #25 · NixOS/nixos-foundation](https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-foundation/issues/25)
@blaggacao @7c6f434c @Infinisil @piegames @Solene @NobbZ
---
### Author:  [@winter](https://discourse.nixos.org/u/winter)
#### Post date: [November 24, 2022, 1:46am UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nixos-github-collaboration/23432/12 "2022-11-24T01:46:40Z")
Would a “feature” (maybe a bug) that makes reviews super annoying at times be acceptable to add to the issue?
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### Author:  [@abathur](https://discourse.nixos.org/u/abathur)
#### Post date: [November 24, 2022, 3:52am UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nixos-github-collaboration/23432/13 "2022-11-24T03:52:54Z")
Added in the issue @ron linked, but I think nixpkgs could benefit from and help refine features focused on improving issue/PR triage workflow.
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### Author:  [@amjoseph](https://discourse.nixos.org/u/amjoseph)
#### Post date: [December 3, 2022, 8:13am UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nixos-github-collaboration/23432/14 "2022-12-03T08:13:02Z")
Many advanced github integration tools fail for nixpkgs, _and only for nixpkgs_ with HTTP 502 Bad Gateway and an opaque error message:
```auto
import error: Something went wrong while executing your query. Please include `A8DE:54BE:87BAE:9F6E7:62140406` when reporting this issue.
```
This only happens for nixpkgs, and I have seen it with multiple different tools. Off the top of my head:
- [problems importing from github.com/nixos/nixpkgs · Issue #749 · MichaelMure/git-bug · GitHub](https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug/issues/749) (the one I really care about)
- [https://github.com/magit/forge/issues/20#issuecomment-468563287](https://github.com/magit/forge/issues/20#issuecomment-468563287)
There are a few others I can’t seem to find anymore.
The combination of the error message not being helpful and the fact that these problems only occur for \>200,000-PR repos like nixpkgs tends to mean they end up being left unresolved ☹
---
### Author:  [@ron](https://discourse.nixos.org/u/ron)
#### Post date: [January 16, 2023, 7:19am UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nixos-github-collaboration/23432/15 "2023-01-16T07:19:13Z")
Meeting with Github on Tuesday 🙂
Plan to share all of the replies here and the thread we created here → [Github Request List - Feedback/Issues/Features · Issue #25 · NixOS/nixos-foundation](https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-foundation/issues/25)
Feel free to add anything else by then. This isn’t the last opportunity as this will be a recurring quarterly event.