| 10 Mar 2026 |
 infinisil | You should soon be onboarded to the internal admin/mentor channel where we can organise a bit better, as well as the GSoC platform itself as a mentor | 21:00:35 |
 Lisanna | okay, thanks for clarifying. so google sponsors the mentors to make it easier for participants to onboard, work with the community, and work on the proposal, rather than acting as a central organizer for people to find things to work on | 21:00:58 |
| infinisil | Not entirely. Mentors don't get any sponsoring by default, but the Nixos foundation board decided to forward the funds we get for each project to the mentors mentoring that project, which was also done the last time :)
The incentive for mentors should really be that you can get somebody to spend a significant amount of time on something you'd like to get done under your supervision | 21:04:38 |
| Lisanna | ahhh | 21:04:58 |
| Lisanna | well I have plenty incentive on that front then since I'd love for it to be easier to implement remote builders :) | 21:05:50 |
| infinisil | Nice! Then yeah, I recommend reaching out to people here to see if anybody wants to work on your idea :) | 21:07:10 |
| Lisanna | I've already had someone reach out to me who was interested, not fully committed yet, but very interested and might submit a proposal | 21:07:39 |
 prescientmoon | Ohh, makes sense! | 21:11:18 |
| 11 Mar 2026 |
 unselect4100 | Hello, I am Kada, currently in the last year of high school. I have been using NixOS for about 1 year and created several custom packages and devshells for my school and personal projects. I was using arch for almost 4 years before switching to NixOS, but the ease of management is so much better on NixOS so now I only install NixOS on new devices by copying config and use nix package manager for my old arch device for devshells. I've always wanted to get myself involved into projects like nixpkgs and learn how open source projects operate, and I have too much free time after the exams in May. Hence, I decided to participate in GSoC and found NixOS Foundation listed as one of the organisations. I was excited to see the PR review project on the idea list, as it perfectly fits my desire to learn the project's operation and at the same time I can improve my knowledge in nix also. Looking forward to participate and gain experience. | 07:41:56 |
|  bhavithreddy joined the room. | 07:58:54 |
|  beeb5k joined the room. | 17:26:22 |
|  Jia Malik joined the room. | 17:46:24 |
| 12 Mar 2026 |
 Swaraj | Hi infinisil! I wanted to give you a quick update. I reached out to getchoo and dish as you suggested but haven't heard back yet.
In the meantime I've been doing more research on the "Improved release notes for Nixpkgs" idea and have a clear approach in mind. The core idea is a fragment-based system where each release note lives in its own .md file with YAML front matter instead of everyone appending to the same monolithic file. This eliminates merge conflicts and enables structured output. A Python generator would collect all fragments at release time, group them by category, and render the final .section.md. I'd also add a contributor helper script similar to Home Manager's create-news-entry.sh, a CI validator, and a one-time migration tool for existing entries.
Would you be open to sharing your thoughts on this approach? I want to make sure I'm aligned with what the community expects | 05:26:28 |
|  Daigo Suhara joined the room. | 07:19:22 |
| Daigo Suhara | Nice to meet you, I'm Daigo Suhara. I'm a student in the Department of Information Science at a university in Japan. I use Nix for setting up development environments on my home lab machine and my MacBook. I'd like to contribute to enhancing the Nixpkg repository. I'd appreciate any advice on what I should focus on next. Thank you in advance. | 07:29:44 |
|  Charlie Zhang joined the room. | 10:15:38 |
 Robert Hensing (roberth) | Daigo Suhara: we have a list of ideas at https://github.com/NixOS/GSoC/blob/main/ideas/2026.md, maybe there's something in there that resonates with you? | 22:55:32 |
| Robert Hensing (roberth) | @room to everyone here who would like to mentor, please introduce yourselves if you haven't already 👋
I'll also send you an invite for the mentors room. For context see call for mentors and participants | 23:13:31 |
| 13 Mar 2026 |
|  justsarx joined the room. | 11:04:37 |
| Lisanna | Hello! I'm Lisanna. I signed on to be a mentor for my GSoC idea to refactor the remote building protocol the daemon uses when connected to over SSH. I have about a decade of various software engineering and software integration experience, mostly at Intel, and mostly with an HPC background, so I am very interested in making the remote building experience even better. As far as the Nix ecosystem goes, I am the author of a handful of small PRs to Nix, and the author of nix-scheduler-hook. My GitHub is at http://github.com/lisanna-dettwyler ^-^ | 13:32:09 |
| Lisanna | * Hello! I'm Lisanna. I signed on to be a mentor for my GSoC idea to refactor the remote building protocol the daemon uses when connected to over SSH, to make it usable by other programs linking against libnix-store. I have about a decade of various software engineering and software integration experience, mostly at Intel, and mostly with an HPC background, so I am very interested in making the remote building experience even better. As far as the Nix ecosystem goes, I am the author of a handful of small PRs to Nix, and the author of nix-scheduler-hook. My GitHub is at http://github.com/lisanna-dettwyler ^-^ | 13:54:44 |
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| 14 Mar 2026 |
| Daigo Suhara | Thank you for the advice! "Declarative user profile pictures" project really resonates with me.
I noticed the mentor section says "(Add yourself here!)". Does the organization typically assign mentors later, or should I reach out to potential mentors on my own? I'm eager to start discussing the technical approach. | 11:51:03 |
| Robert Hensing (roberth) | We're about to do another call for mentors today pending a technical issue, but you can also reach out on your own | 11:53:18 |
| Daigo Suhara | I'll start reaching out on my own while looking forward to the official call for mentors. Thank you. | 12:06:42 |
|  iron_greninja joined the room. | 17:24:01 |
|  @mdaniels5757:matrix.org joined the room. | 20:38:19 |
| @mdaniels5757:matrix.org | Hi! Is there a reason you made two issues in NixOS/nixpkgs (https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/499902 and https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/499904)? They seem identical, but somehow I only got notified about the second one... | 20:39:15 |
| @mdaniels5757:matrix.org | * Hi! Is there a reason you made two issues in nixpkgs (https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/499902 and https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/499904)? They seem identical, but somehow I only got notified about the second one... | 20:39:29 |
