Tweag+Nix dev update #52

[thufschmitt]

Hello Nixers!
January is the time for new year’s resolution, so it’s a good opportunity to revive the regular dev updates that the Tweag Nix group used to give.
Since the previous update was already six months ago, that one will be shallower than usual to stay short. Hopefully the coming ones will be able to enter into more details.

Nix

• Thanks to the work of @fricklerhandwerk, @thufschmitt and the rest of the Nix maintainers and contributors, some slow-but-sure progress has been made towards the stabilisation of the new Nix command-line.

  • The bulk of the nix store set of commands is now designed, and nearly implemented (barring some left-over work in nix store gc)
  • A number of other smaller commands (nix hash, nix doctor) have been reworked for consistency.

• These past months also saw a lot of discussion around fetchTree, which was identified as the very first item on the path to stable flakes. It has eventually been agreed that it should be marked as stable after the coming Nix release.

@fricklerhandwerk wrote a report on the team’s progress on both these topics a few months ago

Nixpkgs

• @infinisil has been steadily pushing forward his work on RFC 140. Over the past months,
  • The RFC itself got accepted EDIT: This was already the case at the time of the last update;
  • The required infrastructure got added to Nixpkgs, and many packages moved to it;
  • The new structure will very soon be enforced for most new packages.
• @infinisil wrapped-up the work on file set combinators just before the NixOS 23.11 release, and announced them in a blog article.

Teaching, documentation and events

• Most of the team attended NixCon 2023 in Darmstadt, with several presenting:
  • @infinisil gave a much awaited presentation about the simple-packages-paths RFC;
  • @thufschmitt talked about the lessons taken from building Organist;
  • @fricklerhandwerk presented the work of the documentation team for the last year;
  • @benradford showed the work done with @Ericson2314 on layered stores for Nix;
  • @thufschmitt participated in the board panel held there.
• During NixCon, @infinisil also co-organised a workshop around the community governance.
• @infinisil kept running the weekly Nix hour, with the invisible but essential help of @yoriksar.
• @thufschmitt gave an introductory talk about Nix at GitKon 2023, along with a companion blog post
• @fricklerhandwerk attended Ocean Sprint 2023 to spend the week hacking with others on a bunch of Nix-related topics.
• @thufschmitt and others community members obtained and organised a devroom and stand for FOSDEM 2024 (next month!)
• @fricklerhandwerk ran (on non-Tweag-funded time) a series of interviews for Summer of Nix. Two of them featured Tweagers:
  • One with @infinisil about the Nixpkgs architecture work
  • One with @mat and @thufschmitt about commercial usages of Nix

Community work

• @thufschmitt organised a monthly meeting of all the established community teams to foster collaboration between them, and help to make progress on otherwise hard to move items
  • Whether this will have an impact is still to be determined, but that meeting already offered an occasion to discuss sensitive topics around funding or the requirements to set for official projects.
• @fricklerhandwerk co-drafted a proposal to support funding for the teams

Organist

• Nickel-nix got its first release, and changed its name to “Organist” for the occasion.

  The project got officially announced in a blog post. It can now handle everything you might want from a development environment (providing dependencies, of course, but also managing services and configuration files)

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That’s all folks