Nixpkgs.news - A Weekly Recap For The Nix Community

Hi there! I’ve been creating weekly recaps of the on-goings in the Nix community for the last few weeks. Originally this started as an experiment to create auto-generated posts, but has turned into me going through Announcements on the forum here and Pull Requests on GitHub to write the posts myself. I’m hoping that it can help provide some more visibility into important announcements, releases, and fixes.

This is all done by me currently looking through PRs and Announcements, but if you have anything on a given week that is a big event for the Nix community then please feel free to let me know and I’ll include it!

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Great work! Looking forward to reading future posts. Some feedback: It might just be a me thing, but I find the font used to be very hard to read, some of the characters are very thin.

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I like the summary of new packages and security fixes. Thank you very much.

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The font is also very hard to read for me.

Also * [@NyCodeGHG](https://github.com/NyCodeGHG): added `appium-inspector`: [Pull Request](https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/286487) is no longer correct, as the package was dropped already.

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I suggest to mention this change Fix venv creation in Python environments by cwp · Pull Request #297628 · NixOS/nixpkgs · GitHub in your next recap.

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Good work for sharing news related to nixos. It is a significant drawback in the nixos and the nixos community.
There is lots of cool stuff on the internet related to nixos that people do not know about, and it is a significant step.

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Great job.
I must admit that the pre-posters are right that the combination of fonts and colors of the website makes it difficult to read.

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I too find it hard to read and is the site source code open?

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The source is available here: GitHub - jakehamilton/nixpkgs.news

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Is the package addition completely extracted manually? I found that some of my packages were mentioned but others were not

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It’s been a bit hit or miss. I’m pulling pull requests that were merged in the previous week and then manually searching for “init” mentions given the nixpkgs convention. Do you have an example of one package which was merged in the previous week, but not mentioned in the article? I can try to take a look and see why.

Here is the script I am using to gather info: nixpkgs.news/tools/fetch-news.js at c647c6f038df26f26e2c804362650fc56c916eb7 · jakehamilton/nixpkgs.news · GitHub

Great work @jakehamilton :tada:

The nixpkgs.news have become a staple in my catching-up what’s going on.

One question/ comment:
Would it be possible to add a short description to each of the new packages?
It’s sometimes very hard to guess what a package is doing purely from the name, and browsing every commit link to look at meta.description feels a bit cumbersome.

I’m assuming here that meta.description is a given for all packages (haven’t done any verification), a possible implementation could take the first X (e.g. 80) chars from meta.description :thinking:

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I’m happy to see this change :slight_smile:

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I was thinking about this last week. I am going to try playing around, but it will depend on how useful the descriptions are and how big they make the section. Part of the trouble with this list has been that it is mostly manual still. PRs don’t all follow the same naming format so I can’t easily pull out info automatically.

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Saw myself mentioned a couple times, interesting to read though. Fun to see what other people are doing but summarized and not entirely a giant list.

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