What are your goals for 21.05?

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In a similar vein to https://discourse.nixos.org/t/what-are-your-goals-for-20-09, what are people’s goals for the upcoming release?

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I can start:

  • Get basinix into a usable state before ZHF
  • Release 21.05 in May :slight_smile:
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  • Finish hook’ifying of buildRustPackage. This is mostly done, with one more PR in the queue. I want to clean up the hooks a bit more and improve the documentation.
  • It is currently not possible to use AMD’s ROCm OpenCL implementation and OpenGL in the same application due to Mesa and ROCm using different LLVM versions. Since I have access to an AMD GPU machine again, I want to fix this before 21.05. Can’t work on this anymore, AMD has dropped support for all gfx8 (e.g. Polaris) GPUs and APUs are not well-supported either, so I have no hardware to test it.
  • Move PyTorch to CUDA 11 by default to support Ampere GPUs. Probably requires another upstream release, there were some large regressions with convolution layers in PyTorch 1.7.1 + CUDA 11.
  • May not make it in time for 21.05, but I want to try working towards avoiding build failures of (primarily ML) packages that get send to Hydra nodes that do not have the requisite SIMD instructions. I have made a PR (Nix#4551) to expose the micro-architecture levels that were recently added to the ELF x86-64 psABI. If we could get something like that in Nix, we could use x86-64-v[234] as additional platforms in derivations.
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  • A bit-by-bit reproducible nixos-minimal ISO image (main remaining PR’s are gcc, python, squashfs and linux-firmware)
  • Casual contributions: various updates, new packages, removing dependencies on jdk8
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I know you’re probably in the rapid development stage right now but when things are more stable I’d be happy to submit some PRs to basnix

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I’ve been procrastinating a bit just due to burnout, but eventually I would love for someone who is knowledgeable in rust to give some of the code a through look-over.

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And probably a whole bunch of other unexpected great shiny stuff.

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Sorry if this is entirely redundant – I haven’t followed the recent work on Plasma Wayland – but it’s better to not package any Plasma Wayland session before version 5.20 (changelog), which addresses many, many bugs either intrinsic to Wayland or related to the way Wayland handles gtk applications. I think setting a >=5.20 requirement would be wise to ensure a pleasant user experience for the NixOS users.

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There is a Plasma Wayland session available for testing on unstable? That’s the channel I am subscibed to, yet the only session I’ve seen in X.org.

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I have more of a wish for 21.05: make plasma better. When I tried it a while ago there where several things broken like I couldn’t change the settings for my touchpad. Not sure if this is still the case. I am using Debian Sid plasma since then.

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I would also like to see Gnome 40 make it into 21.05 in a polished state, willing to put some elbow grease there if there’s a lack of manpower though i’m not super familiar with how “core” gnome software is handled on NixOS. The current version of Gnome in unstable is problematic for non-declarative wireguard VPNs through network manager, though gnome 3.38.4 would fix that problem even if 40 doesn’t make it in.

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Everything I do is polished, don’t worry :grin: Luckily for GNOME we’re actively trying to build a team to maintain it. If you’d like to help it would be welcome, but DE packaging is kinda complex so you’ve been warned. (more details can be asked in #nixos-gnome on Freenode.)

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Moving to this logo New logo · Issue #50 · NixOS/nixos-artwork · GitHub.
Improving nix-darwin support and implementing it in the NixOS organization :upside_down_face:

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I’d be keen to join and help the Gnome effort, if only because I’d like to selfishly see Gnome stay up to date.

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Well, you’ll be pleased to hear the entire GNOME team here is equally as selfish :sparkles:
You could add yourself here to make it official https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/c83315ed5d7aa1fd203f1739d7cb4638816895ea/maintainers/team-list.nix#L79. Currently GNOME 40 is in progress GNOME: 3.38 → 40 by jtojnar · Pull Request #117081 · NixOS/nixpkgs · GitHub among other things I’d like to see gnome3: Package all the Gnome extensions by piegamesde · Pull Request #108414 · NixOS/nixpkgs · GitHub

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We’ve merged in BGRT support for plymouth by default https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/114000. Would also iterate on having Grub autohide so startup is very smooth

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On curiosity, since staging-next has been merged (GNOME: 3.38 → 40 by jtojnar · Pull Request #117081 · NixOS/nixpkgs · GitHub).
Does it means GNOME 40 will be in Unstable on 20.05?

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Yes, the release schedule has been aligned with the GNOME 40 release in mind.

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Yes, and there’s an exception to RFC85, that they can still put in breaking changes into staging during ZHF, as long as it “improves user experience”.

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