Another call for Darwin maintainers

[toonn]

We have a darwin-maintainers team, which is currently hovering around 50 members.

If you'd like to join the team, we're looking for help with the following:

• Review and test open PRs
• Participate in reducing the number of failing darwin packages
• Respond when NixOS/darwin-maintainers is pinged on an issue/PR that you are knowledgeable about

You're welcome to join the Nix on MacOS community on Matrix.

If you want to help out but don't have access to aarch64-darwin hardware you can request access to the Darwin build box. Note that it's shared hardware so communicate in the Matrix room when you're doing stdenv rebuilds for a while. A great big thanks to @winterqt for starting that initiative and the Infra team for keeping it going!

Feel free to nominate yourself and help use bring macOS into a better state : )

This is a spiritual successor to #145230, thank you, Domen, for improving the state of Darwin support so far.

[zimbatm]

Thanks for the initiative @toonn. Until something official gets set up, I will take Domen's place to add new members.

[toonn]

Thank you, Jonas!

I went through the tail end of the previous issue up to the first person already part of the team.

@cidkidnix, @khaneliman, @iFreilicht, @heywoodlh, @DontEatOreo, @siriobalmelli, @matteo-pacini and @afh, welcome to the team.

[afh]

Thank you @toonn and @zimbatm, very much appreciated! Happy to be part of the team 😃

[Guanran928]

I have two x86_64-darwin machines, I'm interested in helping whenever I can :)

[zimbatm]

Added @Guanran928, welcome to the team!

[juliusrickert]

I'm running Nix on aarch64-darwin machines with nix-darwin and home-manager. I'd like to support maintaining Nix on macOS. :)

(I'd happily support Nixpkgs, not only on macOS-related topics. I don't know anything about the processes for "applying" to help.)

[Mic92]

Btw. If the maintainer of nix-darwin wants get builder for their CI, in nix-community we should have enough builder capacity by now. Just drop by in our matrix channel. I now also have macOS laptop so I can test/port my software to it as you can see from my projects like this: https://github.com/nix-community/srvos/pull/441

[emilazy]

Thanks for the offer @Mic92! We currently don’t have elaborate enough testing in nix-darwin for it to really be worthwhile but VM tests is something we’ve tried working towards before, so it might be helpful for us in future.

[donn]

I can help out a bit on the weekends 🙂

[Aleksanaa]

Please also onboard me. I borrowed aarch64-darwin. (from a friend in high school who cannot use her computer on weekdays) (having strict parents is not a bad thing, lol)

[kashw2]

I'd be happy to help out using the community darwin builder for the moment before I'm able to get myself a darwin system sometime soon.

[thecaralice]

I have an aarch64-darwin and I have fixed some packages on darwin, would be glad to help

[winterqt]

We currently don’t have elaborate enough testing in nix-darwin for it to really be worthwhile but VM tests is something we’ve tried working towards before, so it might be helpful for us in future.

@emilazy I actually wrote a scriptable VM harness that I planned to PR to nix-darwin at some point, but life got in the way. If you'd like, I can definitely throw up the code somewhere, for inspiration if nothing else?

[emilazy]

@winterqt Sure, that would be great to see! I know @Enzime put work into this too; IIRC the hard parts involved automating macOS installation in AArch64 VMs. I wanted to try and keep similar code paths on x86_64-darwin and aarch64-darwin which seemed like it might be tricky at the time, but it was quite a while ago so the virtualization situation might be simpler now. And of course there’s Apple’s draconian licensing limits on concurrent VMs we’d have to consider that would be an inherent bottleneck unless we can use multiple physical machines.

That said, we should probably keep this issue focused on people joining the Darwin maintainers team – I’m available in #nix-darwin-dev:matrix.org or via email if you want to share what you got working.

[zimbatm]

I gave @toonn team maintainer so he can add existing org members himself.

Added @donn as he isn't an org member yet!

[toonn]

Invited @juliusrickert, @Aleksanaa, @kashw2 and @thecaralice.

Welcome to the team!

[eliandoran]

@toonn , I would like to be part of this as well.

I only have a x86-64_darwin, but I would like to help with reviews and fixing build errors.

[tko]

How does one test PRs? Wouldn't trust my comments on reviews but I could at least try build some.

[Aleksanaa]

How does one test PRs? Wouldn't trust my comments on reviews but I could at least try build some.

If you are mentioned or asked to review, you will most likely be asked to test on darwin, modify dependencies and add common workarounds. But normally you just need to add some packages under darwin.apple_sdk according to the build failure.

[tko]

But normally you just need to add some packages under darwin.apple_sdk according to the build failure.

How does one do that exactly? Asking for link to docs.

(I kind of understand how to get home-manager install packages, but getting specific packages from different sources is beyond me.)

[toonn]

@eliandoran, invited. Welcome to the team!

@tko, testing PRs is most conveniently done using nixpkgs-review. Though to actually give approval you should review the code changes.

[yzx9]

I am currently dedicating my time to this in my aarch64_darwin, even though I'm still a noob. If that's okay, I would love to be a part of this.

[toonn]

@yzx9, invited. Welcome to the team!

Experience is appreciated but not a requirement as long as I have some interactions on issues/PRs to gauge whether or not someone's been helpful.

[fidgetingbits]

I'm happy to help with this. Been running nix on an M1 for a little while.

[devusb]

Also happy to help -- using packages from nix on aarch64-darwin daily for work -- very motivated to help keep things working :)

[gador]

I'd also like to help. I have a aarch64-darwin box 👍