 | Nixpkgs Stdenv | 228 Members |
| 75 Servers |
| Nixpkgs Stdenv | 228 Members |
| 75 Servers |
| Sender | Message | Time |
|---|---|---|
| 20 Mar 2025 | ||
 Tristan Ross | What's the solution then? | 01:28:46 |
| Tristan Ross | Ah, that might work. | 01:29:15 |
| Tristan Ross | Would doing both a call and sharing documents work? There will be notes after the call. | 01:33:17 |
 Alyssa Ross | In reply to @rosscomputerguy:matrix.org Playing to the strengths of the people involved. People working on Nixpkgs stdenv are clearly very able and available with asynchronous, text-based communication, but there's no reason to assume that they'll be good with synchronous voice, or that it will even be possible for them. If the problem is getting PRs reviewed, then one thing that could be done without increasing everybody's workload would be for a volunteer to try to act as a shepherd — go through PRs that are stuck, figure out whose review is needed, and contact them personally to try to get it — maybe they haven't realised, have been overwhelmed by notifications, etc. Focus should be on supporting volunteers rather than creating new commitments for them. | 08:24:03 |
 emily | IMO the problems with stdenv work are just the usual Nixpkgs things of lack of available time from the most knowledgable parties and burnout, especially with a lot of the most qualified people having quit the project. even if calls were workable it would take away from the scarce time available to actually review and work on things | 11:02:44 |
| emily | that said, I don't think I've seen stdenv work be more stalled/blocked on average than any other work in Nixpkgs… big hard-to-review PRs without clearly-defined scope and with unaddressed tricky design points are hard to land in general, which is why I've made recommendations on how to split stuff up | 11:02:52 |
| emily | I agree that triage/shepherding would help though, since contributions falling through the cracks is really common throughout the project. unfortunately forgetting about things is the inevitable consequence of trying to balance a huge scope of things falling upon a small number of contributors without avoiding burnout, so I err on the side of having an unreliable SLA over having one fewer person involved in this work entirely :/ | 11:04:55 |
 Philip Taron (UTC-8) | I'll echo everyone else and note that regularly scheduled calls are difficult for me, though I aim to make the one today if it happens. I aim to steward a small number of PRs through -- or leave them in a known state of "these things remain" -- each month. My observation is that steady if slight presence keeps the Nixpkgs train a-rolling. This is basically the same as emily's observation about an "unreliable SLA" -- if there's steady effort somewhere, it's better than bursty attention everywhere, then nowhere. There are a lot of models of how to maintain something. Some are more authorial and creative. Others are more negative, rejecting complexity and refining and emphasizing proper scope. Yet others are about stewardship and connection to community and people. I fall into the last camp. | 15:55:47 |
| Tristan Ross |
It is still going to happen, 3 minutes. | 15:57:55 |
| Tristan Ross |
I think in this capacity, it would be good if someone does volunteer to do review stuff that there be "office" hours. This would be so the reviewer and PR author could work in real time in tandem. Tom Berek has done this a lot and it's proven to work well it seems. | 16:00:12 |
| Tristan Ross | https://jitsi.lassul.us/nixpkgs-stdenv meeting started here | 16:01:09 |
| Tristan Ross | https://pad.lassul.us/k_EnCfiJT6ykaiAaNjIYnA# notes will be here | 16:02:14 |
| Tristan Ross | I really like @[Philip Taron (UTC-8)]'s idea of non-shell builders. It's an interesting concept I feel like we should explore more. I think it could make bootstrapping easier if we didn't need something like coreutils and we could only bootstrap from specific compiler toolchain components we fetch. He also pointed out how Nix itself provides a BusyBox shell so this concept could be flushed out more to where we have the nixpkgs derivation builder bundled inside nix. | 17:10:43 |
 K900 | No | 17:18:13 |
| K900 | No no no no no no no | 17:18:15 |
| K900 | No | 17:18:16 |
| K900 | Stop | 17:18:17 |
| K900 | The LAST thing we need is more coupling between Nix and nixpkgs | 17:18:29 |
| K900 | Also, no, Nix does not provide a busybox shell | 17:18:51 |
| K900 | Nix provides whatever shell it's configured with at build time | 17:18:59 |
| K900 | Which in case of Nixpkgs nix is a Nixpkgs shell | 17:19:09 |
| K900 | Which makes this whole idea weirdly mutually recursive | 17:19:17 |
| K900 | You want easier bootstrapping, we have minimal bootstrap for that | 17:19:31 |
| Philip Taron (UTC-8) | (To be clear, this was a "I want to play around with this cursed thing in order to learn" not a serious proposal for how to do it.) | 17:21:36 |
| Philip Taron (UTC-8) | * (To be clear, this was a "I want to play around with this cursed thing in order to learn" not a serious proposal for how to do it in nixpkgs production.) | 17:22:37 |
| Philip Taron (UTC-8) | Previous experimentation: https://determinate.systems/posts/nuenv/ | 17:23:23 |
| Tristan Ross | There's a reason why I mentioned "concept" | 17:24:25 |
| Tristan Ross | We don't have to fully implement it but it could be an interesting thing to show what is capable | 17:24:53 |
| Philip Taron (UTC-8) | Other related proposals that involve shipping computational machinery with Nix: | 17:26:16 |
| Philip Taron (UTC-8) | Yes, and I believe it's wired through to provide busybox-sandbox-shell specifically. Is that incorrect? | 17:34:10 |