Thanks to the great Nix’s system, many people can contribute to nixpkgs… the problem is that Nix is victim of its popularity as many Pull Request takes ages to be reviewed and merged, up to the point of the creation of this thread.
I have the feeling that this process could be speed-up with a simple addition: we should semi-automatically give instructions on how to test a PR. This way:
- testing most PR is just a simple copy/paste
- it is easier to see which PR are easy to review and which need more effort
Some people/scripts already do it greatly. For instance nixpkgs-update does provide nice instructions as seen here. But most people don’t (I just picked random PR) : even simpler PR that just introduce a new package like here) do not provide any instructions while they are trivial to test with nixpkgs-review… and we can’t really blame anyone as we don’t provide any template to make it easy. For some more complex PR like here, it’s not clear how simple testing the PR is… adding instructions would clarify this point.
Of course, it’s hard to automatically generate instructions for any PR, but at least adding a section in the template with ‘how to test this PR’, pre-filled with some generic code would help a lot, forcing the author of the PR to think about it (maybe github provides a way to automatically insert the url of the current PR to make it even easier to integrate with nixpkgs-review? Or we can use a bot otherwise that edits the original message.).
What do you think?