On 19-01-2015 22:26:00, Georges Dubus wrote: > I'm under the impression that none of the proposal inspired by outside > project seem to fit NixOS, because NixOS is a very different project : it > is a huge and complex linux distro. > > The first consequence is that it is impossible to have expert on each part > on NixOS, because each tiny part requires a specific expertise. To work on > python packaging, you have to be a python developer, to work on kde > packaging, you have to be involved in the kde community, and to work on > libreoffice packaging you have to be knowledgeable on how libreoffice is > built (and very patient). I reckon you'll find much people who are > confident enough to review a change on a specific part on NixOS than you'd > find in another project.
That's indeed a problem I've not thought about yet. I see that NixOS is a complex distro and I see that we are short in man power, so I guess my proposal does not fit that well. > > Secondly, the scope of the project is so huge that checking nothing is > broken takes forever. I most projects, you expect contributors to run the > tests and make sure nothing breaks, but in NixOS, that's much harder. We > make travis timeout, and we do not have enough resources to build a tight > CI that tests every pull request before merging it. > My point on this part was not that nothing breaks, but that no new packages break. Or at least no trivial new packages. For example, I just packaged "ctodo", which is almost dependency-less. These kind of stuff really should not break and I guess it is fairly secure to (kind of) "out source" that from github, as it generates noise in the repo. > Finally, even the definition of "broken" is more blurry than in other > projets. We usually have a few hundreds failing evaluation in hydra, and > the number is quite stable (much fewer than we used to have before the ZHF > project, though). Those failures might be linked to unexpected side > effects of commits, changes in outside world (a tarball has moved) or any > kind of transient failure. It is not possible, as of now, to declare that > nothing must break. > Again, this was not the point. The point was that nothing _new_ breaks. Beeing imperfect is not desired (of course it would be ideal), but getting better is desired. That's a small but important difference, I think. -- Mit freundlichen Grüßen, Kind regards, Matthias Beyer Proudly sent with mutt. Happily signed with gnupg.
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