Sort through the existing NixOS repositories to precise their status

[thufschmitt]

Cleaning-up the list of repositories under https://github.com/orgs/NixOS/repositories should give a pretty good first idea of what's going on in the ecosystem. I've collected the list here with a first estimation of their status. I propose that we:

1. Confirm the statuses with the relevant people
2. Archive the dead things
3. Explicit the maintenance of the living things where it's unclear.

For 3., the nix-community model of specifying the maintainers directly in the project description seems pretty good (except that we probably should make it a GitHub team as the official NixOS projects should have much more of a shared ownership)

[thufschmitt]

I've just opened an issue in NixOps suggesting to sunset it one way or another

[nixos-discourse]

This issue has been mentioned on NixOS Discourse. There might be relevant details there:

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/tweag-nix-dev-update-53/39180/1

[thufschmitt]

Update on that: I have a script to go over all the repositories where someone acknowledged the archival or no one reacted.

@NixOS/admins, can someone either give me temporary admin rights or run that script (after careful review, of course) to act on it?

[infinisil]

@thufschmitt That team name is unfortunate, it's not what you think it is 😄

[vcunat]

github.com/NixOS admins? Off the top of my head, @zimbatm, @domenkozar ?

[thufschmitt]

Thanks @infinisil @vcunat (and I don't think it's the first time I get bitten by this…)

[thufschmitt]

Just ran the script, this should do a good bit of clean-up. Thanks @zimbatm for the access

[DanielSidhion]

Hi @thufschmitt - I think we should reopen https://github.com/NixOS/snapd-nix-base because it's still needed, even thought I expect changes to it will be very rare. Some context:

I'm working on updating some content on the Nixpkgs manual and just came across pkgs.makeSnap. This is the source for it.

That source mentions in these lines that it declares a base snap, which is built from https://github.com/NixOS/snapd-nix-base

I think as long as makeSnap has that implementation, we should keep that repository unarchived.

[thufschmitt]

Thanks for the info @DanielSidhion .

There's apparently an official empty snap on the repository: https://snapcraft.io/bare, do you want to open a PR to Nixpkgs to replace nix-base with bare as the base? That way we don't have to depend on our own unmainained version

EDIT: I didn't see that ours had a /nix at the root, we might want to check that it doesn't break to not have it

[DanielSidhion]

I spent too many hours trying to better understand the snap specs and environment and trying to come up with a patch that works, but I think that given the current snap specs, the current makeSnap can't be patched to use that official empty snap (or any other empty snap, including the existing nix-base) without other heavy modifications to it.

That is currently documented in NixOS/nixpkgs#293376

Given the current state of makeSnap, I think it's ok to keep that other repo archived. Any efforts made to fix makeSnap can also include moving to a different empty base snap.

[thufschmitt]

Sad thing to hear, but thanks for the investigation @DanielSidhion !

I'll keep it archived until/unless someone offers to fix the snap toolchain

[nixos-discourse]

This issue has been mentioned on NixOS Discourse. There might be relevant details there:

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/tweag-nix-dev-update-55/40996/1

[zowoq]

The nixos-weekly repo is pinned, now it has been archived should switch it out for another repo.

[thufschmitt]

The nixos-weekly repo is pinned, now it has been archived should switch it out for another repo.

Good catch. I've replaced it by patchelf (most starred repo that wasn't pinned). Happy for suggestions if folks prefer another one