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2024-02-06 Nixpkgs Architecture Team Meeting #47

Past meeting notes
Matrix announcement
Lead by: @infinisil
Meeting notes by: @infinisil
Attendees: @infinisil @roberth @tomberek

Agenda

Nixpkgs Architecture Team future

@infinisil: Proposal:
- Archive https://github.com/orgs/nixpkgs-architecture
- Remove https://nixos.org/community/teams/nixpkgs-architecture.html
- Migrate issues from https://github.com/nixpkgs-architecture/issues to Nixpkgs repo
- Create "architecture" label
- Create @NixOS/nixpkgs-architecture
- Archive private channel and make public
- Remove the meeting for now
- Regular meeting every 2 weeks with interested parties
@infinisil: The team aspect isn't working out
- No resources
- No responsibilites and no authority
  - @tomberek: How can we address that?
  - @infinisil: Really on an individual level
  - @infinisil: Should be improved more generally, a solution for ownership is needed
  - @tomberek: Drawing parallels to the Nix team, got a lot of little things done, builds trust
  - @tomberek: If you have one big thing, it's a hard thing to catch back up on it if you miss the start
  - @infinisil: If you do small things it's hard to get bigger things done though
  - @roberth: Nix team has succeeded in breaking things down, e.g. fetchTree stabilization as a prerequisite to Flakes stabilization
  - @tomberek: Maybe worth another shot
  - @tomberek: Working group for a specific task vs a discussion ground for various issues
  - @infinisil: Discussion forum could be the "architecture" label
  - @tomberek: Proposal:
    - First finalise pkgs/by-name
    - After that, have a period of getting more contributors, work on smaller things, more splitting of work
    - Authority aspect: Nixpkgs needs something like an architecture team
  - @infinisil: Nixpkgs contributions often have poor quality
  - @roberth: Most people just need to get their stuff done, not as an "engineer"
  - @tomberek: Some people need guidance to learn
- @infinisil: Maybe the balance needs to be improved, a bit more reviewing
  - Maybe RFC mentoring regularly with authors for 1 weekly meeting for a month, get the general direction of the RFC right
  - Blog post/tutorial on authoring RFCs?
- @tomberek: Primary goal of improving contributing experience in Nixpkgs and get more contributors
  - Did it work?
    - @infinisil: Looks like it
  - How to continue the goal?
    - @infinisil: Very abstract, we already have more concrete things to work on. Can use "architecture" label to track these
    - Probably don't need more exploratory work
- @infinisil:Big efforts, probably no volunteers would want that
- Maybe call for sponsors or sponsored people
  - preferably an opencollective?
  - otherwise sponsor an existing contributor
  - otherise sponsor employee time
- @tomberek: There's bigger companies relying on Nix now, should expect them to sponsor maintenance/architecture work
  - @infinisil: Could spend some time on that after pkgs/by-name
- @infinisil: Currently need to wait for reviews for things I do, would be great to have a person that reviews my work
@infinisil: For now writing out the top proposal, doesn't conflict with the above discussion
@infinisil: In the future: RFC for delegating Nixpkgs code owners with authority and responsibility

Misc

Module system builtin for Nix? (discussed last time??)
@Ericson2314: Interesting gcc work going on in NixOS/nixpkgs#132343, might be able to get rid of targetPlatform
Package modules / Bring all packaging layers into a single fixpoint