Hello Nixers!
Here are some news from the Tweag Nix Group, following our last update.
NixCon NA
The big event of the begining of the month (March) was NixCon North America, that @ConnorBaker, Alexandre Prestele and @thufschmitt attended.
Beyond the (very successful imho) conference, it was a great occasion for in-person discussions with other community members. In particular, @ConnorBaker could exchange with various CUDA users about their needs and struggles (generally summarized as “CUDA in Nix is awful, but the rest is way worse”) and @thufschmitt could discuss with other Nix maintainers and contributors, as well as the rest of the foundation board.
Nix
Beyond the usual maintenance work involving a bunch of small reviews and discussions,
- The C bindings work, started by @yorickVP (who left the company since) and continued by @jlesquembre is at last merged! This paves the way to many exciting new applications of Nix;
- @thufschmitt gave a new review pass to Local Overlay Store by Ericson2314 · Pull Request #8397 · NixOS/nix · GitHub. The PR was nearly ready to be merged, except that the latest Nixpkgs update broke a test. This got fixed thanks to the tenacity of @cidkidnix and @Ericson2314 from Obsidian Systems;
- @thufschmitt Prompted for a clarification of the Nix release schedule as a step towards improving the quality of the releases;
-
@thufschmitt opened a pull-request to avoid a nasty error when
nix print-dev-envis used with an old bash (like is the default on Darwin); - @thufschmitt worked towards having the Nix testsuite run the relevant NixOS tests on each commit.
Nixpkgs
- With the RFC on formating merged, @infinisil started implementing it;
- @infinisil officially closed the nixpkgs architecture team;
-
@infinisil migrated the
check-by-nametooling to a new repository to make it easier to iterate on it.
Documentation
-
@fricklerhandwerk imported a
callPackagetutorial (originally written by @NobbZ) to nix.dev. This fills a small but important need ascallPackageis used nearly everywhere in Nixpkgs; - @fricklerhandwerk and @infinisil worked together to display the manual pages for all the Nix versions in <nix.dev>.
Community work
- @fricklerhandwerk gave the NixCon PL team some help with planning the next European NixCon;
- @thufschmitt helped with the (heated) discussions about a new sponsorship policy;
- @infinisil drafted a documentation of the community resources.
Genealogos
The Genealogos SBOM generator is developed by @ErinvanderVeen thanks to an NLNet grant.
- The project got quite a bit of traction over the last month:
- It got noticed by the OWASP CycloneDX working group, leading to some interesting discussions;
- Some members of the Linux Foundation (and the ELISA working group in particular) also showed some interest in the project (and through it in Nix) and suggested us to present a talk for the next Open-source summit in september;
- The web frontend implemented by @ErinvanderVeen got merged, and extended with a live status report from the evaluation backend;
- Thanks to a related change in
nixtract, the tool can now include the runtime dependencies in the report; - The CycloneDX SBOM generator now uses the new “official” cyclonedx-bom crate (adding support for XML output amongst other things);
- Alongside with that change, the SBOM generation engine is now more generic, paving the way to a potential SPDX support.
Fediversity
- @Radvendii kept working on the Fediverse deployment layer, with a service now allowing to easily deploy Mastodon, Peertube and Pixelfed alongside each other, with all the data stored in a Garage server.
That’s all folks