| 10 Mar 2026 |
 prescientmoon | Hi! I was talking to lassulus about a possible project proposal I'd be interested in. Is the process of submitting such a proposal simply a matter of opening a PR to the nixos GSOC repo? | 18:54:27 |
 K900 | You can also just post it here | 19:08:33 |
| prescientmoon | I think lassulus has the actual details, but the idea was for me to work on the vars PR (#370444) | 19:15:31 |
 infinisil | Nah, you'll need to use google's online form when submissions open. The repo doesn't track anything other than a list of ideas, not concrete proposals | 20:31:06 |
| infinisil | * | 20:31:26 |
 Lisanna | will I as the listed mentor need to take any action for my project idea to be submitted if it's already on the ideas list (not draft)? | 20:43:42 |
| K900 | You will still need to submit | 20:48:22 |
| K900 | Either the mentor or the mentee | 20:48:29 |
| Lisanna | do I already have to have found a participant to submit the proposal? | 20:55:54 |
| Lisanna | or will it go on a central list somewhere that others can find and claim from | 20:56:22 |
| K900 | You have time until the submission deadline to find a participant | 20:58:26 |
| infinisil | Lisanna You can reach out to the people that have shown up here, to see if anybody is interested in submitting a concrete proposal for your idea, and then work with them to figure out the details :)
But ultimately it's the contributer who has to submit the proposal using google's form | 20:59:15 |
|  tadrist abdellah joined the room. | 21:00:26 |
| 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 |
