In September, on the day before this year’s All Systems Go! conference, the first NixOS Plumbers Summit took place. This is a short report from that summit for anyone who’s interested.
Original announcement: First NixOS Plumbers Summit - Berlin 2025-09-29
Location
The summit took place in a cozy room at cultivation.space in Berlin, Germany. We had a big screen, Wi-Fi, snacks, drinks and a cantina in the building complex for lunch.
Topics
We went through several topics, giving status reports on different projects and also discussed ideas for future work:
- declarative installer, based on systemd-repart
- maintainability in nixpkgs
- bashless NixOS (part of the interpreter-less efforts)
- image building in general
- VMs and NixOS tests
- snix and snix-castore
- build provenance
- documentation
- meta: organisation
More detailed notes of the discussions are available in the following pad:
https://pad.lassul.us/s/minutes-first-nixos-plumbers-summit
Note that this report comes much later than originally planned. Since the summit, individual efforts were not put on hold, so the status has changed for some of the topics in the meantime.
Feedback and future iterations
Just before closing the summit, all participants gave feedback on this first iteration of the event. Overall the feedback was quite positive and we agreed that the summit should repeat.
The small number of participants allowed us to have just a single strand of conversation with everyone following.
The combination of the event with a conference that targets a similar technical audience worked well.
There was some confusion about the target audience for the summit but all misunderstandings were solved before the event took place. The summit’s main focus is technical discussion, meaning the target audience consists of people already involved in topics mentioned in the announcement. The motivation behind this is that every attendee should be able to easily follow and participate in discussions, thereby reducing the time needed for explaining familiar concepts to a minimum.
Participants should have the opportunity to collect their topics before the event, saving some valuable time in the beginning.
Future improvements should also include an announcement earlier than just two weeks ahead of the event. In that sense, I’m asking interested individuals to save the date: 2026-01-29T23:00:00Z, somewhere in Brussels (one day before FOSDEM), the event is not yet confirmed but I expect to have more details after 39C3.