| 28 Sep 2025 |
 bit-aloo | Hey everyone! Hope this is the right channel for asking. I've been using nix at work and understand its basics. I would love to dive deeper and contribute meaningfully to the project. It would be awesome if someone could guide me in which direction or resources to look for. | 17:27:51 |
 WeetHet | If you want to contribute to nix the package manager (which I'm really not sure you want to if you only understand the basics), you can look at the contributing guide here:
https://github.com/NixOS/nix/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md
If you don't want to work with the (not so great) C++ code of nix the package manager you can go and contribute to nixpkgs:
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md
You can help with fixing reproducibility of a package, add a new one, write a nixos module for a missing program/service or work on more fundamental stuff like the stdenv or any of the language ecosystems. Personally, these two are interesting for me, but you might wanna search yourself:
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/334195
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/333702
If you don't want to write nix either, there are outside issues like
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/424345
decentralized binary caching, etc
You can also help around on discourse or in #users:nixos.org
| 17:54:04 |
| WeetHet | There's also a ton of community projects you can contribute to:
https://github.com/nix-community | 17:54:59 |
 Taeer Bar-Yam | John Ericson You were talking about getting rid of the std::enable_shared_with_this for SourceAccessor. We should talk at some point about
- Why you want to get rid of it
- If you have any ideas about how to get rid of it
- How you feel about
boost::intrusive_ptr
Because it's currently driving me up a wall
| 21:46:01 |
 John Ericson | @shine:proqqul.net: I thought it was only needed for path values. If you do something else for path values, then we can like have a separate source accessor address spaces with indices | 21:52:58 |
| John Ericson | And index regular shared pointers | 21:53:16 |
| John Ericson | No need to do shared from this | 21:53:22 |
| Taeer Bar-Yam | you're imagining an array of shared pointers? | 21:54:16 |
| Taeer Bar-Yam | oh i see. and hold an index in the Value | 21:54:25 |
| Taeer Bar-Yam | hmmm | 21:54:26 |
| Taeer Bar-Yam | what's your reason for wanting to get rid of enable_shared_with_this? | 21:55:11 |
| Taeer Bar-Yam | I'm not opposed, I'm just trying to understand the constraints on the design space | 21:56:46 |
| John Ericson | In reply to @shine:proqqul.net
what's your reason for wanting to get rid of enable_shared_with_this? We don't always put the accessors behind shared pointers | 23:18:08 |
| John Ericson | And I just hate enable shared from this lol | 23:18:17 |
| John Ericson | It feels deeply non modular | 23:18:41 |
| John Ericson | (I wonder if explicit this could make it better, but that's another topic) | 23:19:48 |
| 29 Sep 2025 |
|  samppu joined the room. | 13:47:01 |
 niksnut | Taeer Bar-Yam: https://github.com/DeterminateSystems/nix-src/commit/4c028281a7a7ee657b0f180000dce3b19d485b9b | 17:13:09 |
| 30 Sep 2025 |
 Sergei Zimmerman (xokdvium) | Ok Robert Hensing (roberth), I've debugged why builtins.readDir behaves so weirdly. Wrote some unit tests documenting the currently broken behavior https://github.com/NixOS/nix/pull/14123 | 00:20:27 |
|  mjolnir banned  @mightyiam:matrix.org (divisive behavior.). | 19:22:19 |
|  daylin joined the room. | 20:53:10 |
| 1 Oct 2025 |
 fzakaria | Finally! | 03:29:21 |
| fzakaria | removed all shellcheck exclusions...
https://github.com/NixOS/nix/pull/14129 | 03:29:26 |
 lassulus | why does nix repl behave different when I run nix repl . vs running :lf in nix repl? | 11:32:12 |
| lassulus | like inputs is not available in the first case, is there a rationale for that I'm not understanding? | 11:32:39 |
| Sergei Zimmerman (xokdvium) | In reply to @lassulus:lassul.us
why does nix repl behave different when I run nix repl . vs running :lf in nix repl? I recall there was an issue or a discussion about this. Can’t find it now though | 11:37:44 |
| lassulus | ok, maybe I will try looking in the issue tracker than, than you :) | 11:38:42 |
 Mic92 | In reply to @lassulus:lassul.us
like inputs is not available in the first case, is there a rationale for that I'm not understanding? Also find this confusing | 12:54:33 |
| Mic92 | matthewcroughan: any chance this can be git bisected? https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/14130 | 15:26:01 |
|  @aloisw:julia0815.de left the room. | 15:28:06 |
