There are many desktop apps I use daily on NixOS 24.11 that are “rolling” or receive minor updates. There are many people pulling these updates into master, but I’m still on the stable release.
How should this be handled? Options I see:
Just pull package from unstable in my configuration.nix (already have this for one other package)
Request on PR’s that they be backported (which I have been doing, and fixing any merge conflicts if they arise)
Something else?
Maybe like there is the auto updater for some packages there could be the “auto backporter” for others?
Requesting a backport is a safer option than mixing in unstable.
Automatic backports have been discussed, but lack of interest meant the proposals never went anywhere. If you’re personally interested, you can pick up those proposals again / create your own.
Slightly off topic but why? I though the point of nix was each package could be isolated. If I use unstable.wine as i want wine 10 in 24.11 then it’s build is linked and isolated to itself is it not? A concrete example of how this could cause issues would be helpful as I want to learn more!
I am! I have a very naive script/job/action that would run on each merge to master and check for changed packages, then check that against a list - last part would be to extract the GH PR and add the label. I’m sure there’s things I didn’t consider yet but it feels like anything to lighten the load for these “chore” type tasks for maintainers would be helpful.
And lastly I just want to say thanks for how easy it is to get into package dev and contributing here - I’ve never been able to contribute to other distro’s based on how much red tape (for lack of a better term) there is, but here it’s a very normal, modern flow.
It’s an unfortunate side effect of some of the remaining impurities in NixOS like the graphics stack.
It’s also just a net benefit for the community if the backport request comes through and stable gets more up-to-date packages (assuming no breaking changes).