NixOS / NixOS/org

Document Nixpkgs committer rules

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#122 40 comments 25 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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48
Forks
36
Avg merge
2m
Merged PRs (30d)
3

Description

CONTRIBUTING.md covers the case of being a non-committer trying to get code into Nixpkgs. I don't think there's an authoritative place to look for committers who want to know, e.g., how long they should wait before self-merging a PR (on possible penalty of losing bits), or whose reviews are needed before that's okay, or whether it's okay to be a committer and both a Nixpkgs maintainer and the upstream author of a package.

Probably this is because we, as a community, have never really hammered out what those rules are. But if they're going to have teeth, and especially if the teeth get used without trying to work things out ahead of time, I, uh, really want to know where the lines are, for obvious reasons.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start with CONTRIBUTING.md, then read the linked discussions in issues 50 and 121 to understand the unresolved committer-policy concerns. The work is complete when the community agrees on and publishes an authoritative document covering self-merge waiting periods, required reviews, and conflicts involving maintainers and upstream authors.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Domain
documentation
Issue type
Documentation
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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