New nixpkgs committers interest list

[Mic92]

At the moment we do not have a formal way of nominating people for nixpkgs commit access. Historically we used this github issue where people either self-nominated or got nominated by other people. @lorenzleutgeb's script also wrote a script to summarize past github contributions. From my understanding the plan is that the new NixOS assembly is supposed to come up with a new way and I would like to use this issue to already start collecting nominations for this new process upfront. Use this issue to either nominate a contributor or self-nominate.

Update I started a discussion on zulip on this topic: https://nixpkgs.zulipchat.com/#narrow/stream/435724-governance/topic/New.20nixpkgs.20onboarding.20process

[mweinelt]

I want to nominate @emilazy, who recently carried the OpenSSH SIGALARM vulnerability across all branches and even wrote an advisory and took the time to answer questions and construct a timeline.

Emily has 75 merged PRs and over 100 reviewed PRs. She has been contributing on and off since 2019, and contributed for example the initrd OpenSSH migration.

I think it would be beneficial to further enable a capable person like her.

[emilazy]

Thank you for the nomination! I’d be happy to accept the commit bit if offered. I’ve frequently had long absences from FOSS work in the past several years, so I can’t guarantee availability, but I’d like to be able to contribute more consistently going forward. In the wider ecosystem I’m also a nix-darwin committer so I’m reasonably familiar with the module system, and I helped nix-darwin and Home Manager migrate from the old DocBook documentation toolchain to unblock its removal from Nixpkgs. The biggest thing I’ve done recently was working on removing Mesa as a channel blocker on Darwin, which had caused significant issues and friction in the past. I’m a user of both macOS and Linux and would like to continue to help bridge the gap between the two platforms in terms of maintenance and quality.

[willcohen]

I’d like to apply for the commit bit (and also happy to wait if that makes more sense.)

My first contribution and introduction to Nix was in 2021-2022, to upstream to QEMU an old patchset to enable 9pfs on Darwin, thus allowing for fixing up remote file support on QEMU and thus lima and podman on Mac, with many thanks to @alyssais and @domenkozar in guiding me through all that: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/122420

Since then, I’ve added a couple smaller packages and fixed up others to work better on Mac. My focuses are around GIS software on Mac (my longstanding white whale is to get QGIS working on Mac, which is both close and far: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/157862), keeping emscripten up to date (usually some LLVM tip of tree backports with the help of @RaitoBezarius), Clojure stuff, the occasional dabbling in random JS or Perl packages here and there, and fixing broken things on Mac. I’ve been a little quieter the last year as work focuses pulled me a bit away from programming, but I’m working my way back in to it this summer. I know there’s a perennial need for capacity on Darwin (ie https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/323144) and that a combo of lack of testing and lack of ability to review or land fixes is a big pain point, and would mostly like to help keep those PRs moving in a timely manner.

58 merged PRs: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pulls?q=sort:updated-desc+is:pr+author:willcohen+is:merged

52 reviews: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pulls?q=sort:updated-desc+is:pr+reviewed-by:willcohen+-author:willcohen (edited to remove my own PRs, thanks @eclairevoyant)

No NixOS modules yet — I’m still predominantly Mac-centric, though I sometime play with it in a VM.

[eclairevoyant]

76 reviews of closed PRs, though probably a third of those are nixpkgs-review output of my own PRs:

You can filter those out with -author:willcohen; filtering out own PRs should be done in general for all PR review queries.