Tweag + Nix dev update #34

Development
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Hello Nixers :wave:t2:

After some break time (summer, vacations, all that), here are some news from the Tweag Nix team:

Roadmap!

Because it mostly started as a simple gathering of the Tweag people who happened to work on Nix-related topics, the team has historically had a problem of focus and coordination.
To solve this issue, we decided to get together and collaborate on a roadmap to guide the bulk of our work.
The long-term plans are now set and publicly available.

As stated in the post above, we’ve also decided to regularly publish some shorter-term plans. We’ll expand on these below, right after a quick update on the recent work that has been happening.

Past work

NixOS search

@wyill started an internship to improve search.nixos.org.
His focus on particular is to improve the flakes search by adding some metadata to the schema and using it for the search (nix#6828).

Documentation and communication

Internal communication

Documentation team

Summer of Nix

Nix maintenance

Nixpkgs architecture

Our plans for the coming weeks

This section is structured following our published long-term roadmap.

Making Nix solve people’s problems

Nix package manager team

A recurrent blocker for most changes on the Nix side is that beyond Eelco there’s no clear ownership over the codebase.
This makes everyone’s life hard:

  • It puts a lot on @edolstra’s plate
  • A number of recurrent contributors are willing to take a more active role in the maintenance of the project but don’t really know where to start
  • The experience is poor for most contributors as there’s no clear expectation as to what will happen with their contribution (it might get merged very quickly or get stuck forever)
  • It’s very hard to get a clear understanding of where the project is going since everyone has its own opinion and there is no single place to build a consensus.

To fix that, @thufschmitt wants to start organizing a proper “Nix package-manager team” (or however you’d like to call it) that would be responsible both for the day-to-day maintenance of the project and the medium/long-term vision.

Nix language tutorial

As part of his broader work on the documentation, @fricklerhandwerk’s main focus will be to work on the Nix language tutorial he started.

Nixpkgs architecture

@infinisil plans on keeping the work with the Nixpkgs Architecture team, with the main goals of

  1. Focus the discussions and efforts on some specific actionable issues
  2. Write down all the knowledge that gets exposed during these discussions for future reference and as a basis for a more comprehensive documentation

Making Nix work reliably everywhere

Installer

We’ve mentioned the installer as one of the main things we want to tackle.
Better start right now. @mkaito has accepted to bootstrap the work on that front, with the help of @thufschmitt, @fricklerhandwerk and @solene.

The priority will be to

  1. Gather a community effort around that (a number of community members, such as @abathur and @Artturin, are already doing some great work on that front),
  2. Work on the testing setup.

Making Nix ubiquitous

Metrics

@bjth will take over the work that @garbas started on gathering metrics about the popularity of Nix (cache download stats, social network mentions, etc.) so that the community can know how it is going.

Media content

Still something to be refined, but @bjth and @solene plan on publishing some media content about Nix (be it YouTube videos, podcasts, or anything else)

And that’s all, folks, the rest is history

16 Likes
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The nix language tutorial by @fricklerhandwerk is all I wanted when I first started to learn Nix, great writing style. Good job!

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As a beginner, I second this. Clear, concise and a short read. Thanks for that !

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