Nixpkgs: flow from master to channel

Help
1

Can I find documentation that describes the flow from nixpkgs master to channels ?

For instance, a PR was merged into master. Will it get to nixpkgs-19.09-darwin ? If yes, when ?
If not, how to get pkgs into channels ?

Thanks

1 Like
2

It’s probably documented somewhere, but it’s simple enough that I’ll just outline it.

Each channel is cut from a branch of the NixOS/nixpkgs repo. Unstable variants are cut from master, the 19.09 variants are cut from release-19.09, etc. The actual channel advances to a new version whenever a commit on its NixOS/nixpkgs branch passes the Hydra tests for that channel. So to get something on unstable, you PR to master, and then wait for the next time master passes the unstable Hydra tests. To get changes to master included in nixos-19.09, you backport the patch in a PR to the release-19.09 branch, and wait for release-19.09 to pass the NixOS tests on Hydra.

8 Likes
3

You can see here when a channel was last published.

4 Likes
5

Some things around this are mentioned at Nix channels - NixOS Wiki

1 Like
6

Thanks for detailed answer !

7

Great explanation, thanks!

However, shouldn’t this be part of some official documentation?

2 Likes