Host a nixpkgs-update bot on non-critical-infra

[JulienMalka]

As part of the discussions surrounding the mergebot project, some people have expressed the idea of hosting the r-ryantm bot on official infrastructure. This is because it's been suggested that the mergebot could as a first step only empower people to merge PRs opened by the nixpkgs-update bot. The bot becoming an important piece of infrastructure for the community, it could be managed by the infra team. In order to go forward with this, we have to asses the resources needed to run the bot, and if needed order a machine that can meet the requirements. Pinging relevant people to weigh in @zimbatm @ryantm @zowoq @mic92

[delroth]

@ryantm do you have thoughts on this? Given that you're currently hosting that infra :)

What kind of machine(s) is this running on? Do you have an estimate of resource usage?

[zimbatm]

This fits on this single Hetzner box: https://github.com/nix-community/infra/blob/911374bbea8265e8c927bbdd73d77c8ffeadb480/devdoc/hosts.md?plain=1#L11-L16 For more details, see https://nix-community.org/update-bot/.

I need to check with the rest of the nix-community infra team, and Ryan, but it would be a nice project to promote and use to define what it means for a project to become "official". In general, the degree which the NixOS project depends on a nix-community project is a good signal to decide if we should make things "official". In my view, the bot has become essential to the nixpkgs project's health.

Technically, the transfer procedure could look like this:

• Move the Hetzner box between accounts.
• Move the repo between orgs.
• Transfer the GitHub user to the infra team.

I propose that we keep the same approach as nix-community, where ryan stays the official maintainer, and is free to handle the team as he wants.

[infinisil]

See also https://github.com/NixOS/foundation/issues/39, I've also pondered on this a bunch with some notes, I'll share them in that issue in case I have a good proposal