Hello Nixers!
Here are some news from the Tweag Nix Group, following our last update.
Nix
Beyond the usual maintenance work involving a bunch of small reviews and discussions,
- @jlesquembre worked on the experimental C bindings for Nix, rebasing the pull-request.
- @thufschmitt and the rest of the Nix maintainers worked towards a spec for the final syntax and semantics of the (non-flake) installables;
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@thufschmitt updated the
nixflake to use NixOS 23.11 instead of the eol-ed 23.05; - @thufschmitt fixed the parsing of path-like flake references which is somewhat broken on master. This still isn’t merged unfortunately because of some complications in the test setup;
- @balsoft had an old pull-request allowing to garbage-collect within a closure. @thufschmitt revived it as it is (by far) the single most upvoted feature request in the issue tracker, so deserves some love.
- Nix regularly get some errors from downstream distribution packagers who catch bugs because their distribution builds with more (or different) hardening flags by default. To allow catching these more eagerly (and for a few extra reasons), @thufschmitt started a work to get a more “pedantic” build of Nix in the CI.
- @balsoft fixed some issues in the ACLs branch of Nix
- Preparing for the comint Nix release, @thufschmitt worked on fixing the many hydra failures on master
- Community members @puckipedia and @jade reported a security issue in the Nix sandbox. @thufschmitt worked with the other maintainers, the security team and Nixpkgs maintainers to fix and announce it.
Nixpkgs
- @radvendii updated and discussed his pull request to add live-reloading to the NixOS tests.
- After years of discussion, RFC 166 (co-authored and shepherded by @infinisil) got accepted and merged!
This RFC defines a standard formatting for Nix, to be eventually enforced in Nixpkgs.
Genealogos
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@erinvanderveen extended nixtract (the project that Genealogos uses as the backend for getting information from Nixpkgs) to give it support for getting runtime information from binary caches. This will make Genealogos able to distinguish between the runtime and build-time closure of paths in the generated SBOMs.
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@erinvanderveen created a simple GUI frontend for genealogos, allowing anyone to directly generate a SBOM from their browser.
Fediversity
Fot a few months now, Tweag has been part of the Fediversity consortium.
Fediversity is an NGI-funded project aiming at providing an easy-to-use hosting solution for fediverse (and more broadly decentralized) services such as Mastodon, Peertube, Matrix, etc…
As part of that work, @jime worked on defining the high-level goals of our implication in the project,
and @radvendii started working on a test Mastodon deployment.
Community work
- Linda from the Modus marketing team gave the NixCon NA team some help to plan and organize the sponsorship and pre-promotion of the event.
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@thufschmitt ran the planned bulk-archival of all the old repositories in the NixOS org, archiving some 15 outdated repositories;
- After some more discussion, @thufschmitt also opened a pull request to NixOps to make its status clear in the README;
- @thufschmitt announced the Foundation board decision to give each established team a monthly budget;
- @thufschmitt also caught-up with the publishing of the Foundation board meeting notes and started taking on publishing them on a regular basis
- @infinisil collaborated with @zimbatm (not from Tweag) to sketch a an open Nix organisation
That’s all folks