Nominate @kaynetik

[kaynetik]

Nominate @kaynetik

I nominate myself.

At the moment my primary focus within nix is the nix-darwin ecosystem. I've been a consumer of it for quite some time now, and I wanted to become an active member of the community.

My Nix contributions at this moment are negligible:

• sbarlua: 5.4 -> 5.5; add new maintainer nixpkgs#498766
• dotenvx: 1.51.1 -> 1.57.2 nixpkgs#500959
• aerospace: 0.20.2-Beta -> 0.20.3-Beta nixpkgs#501530

I've noticed a pattern across other unrelated packages where there's a single maintainer it's difficult to get their attention in timely manner. And personally when I see that a PR is not addressed within 2-3 days, it probably means that such a package would benefit from a co-maintainer.

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My intention by applying for the committers team is to have higher degree of freedom with the packages I'd like to help maintain & improve. I'd also pledge to wait 24h always for the existing maintainer to respond, and if not then to "leverage" higher permissions allowed to the committers team.

In the first year I'll focus on refining dependencies for the nix-darwin ecosystem - so that more people could be less dependant on homebrew and mac-ports. Once I achieve that, I would like to also see where I could help in the NixOS core.

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If you aren't open to considering someone as fresh as I am I can fully understand, and maybe even agree - and if that is the case I'd also appreciate giving me bread crumbs as to what would be the right track so I can join this team in the next couple of years.

Much appreciated,
Aleksandar

[kaynetik]

Of course, I hope you don't find this nomination insulting, or out of bounds in any sense of the word.

If it's considered as anything but an eagerness of a new member, do take that into account, and point me on a potential right track - as I would really love to be here for the long run. 🫡

[kaynetik]

After seeing this ^, the first thing that came across was "Why wouldn't an FOSS project embrace more committers?"

Then I looked at the rejected nominations and realized what it's actually all about - immense number of reviews and automated flows. Facepalm on my end, but it is what it is.

I guess I'll reopen this PR in a few years from now. 🫡

[leona-ya]

Hey, I don't want to just have 👎 as the only reaction given to you. I'm not part of the commit delegation team, but am one of the committers.
It's correct, that we have not enough committers and maintainers. But, as an operating system and package manager, we take security seriously. When some gets the committer status, they can merge whatever they want and in a bad case even vulnerabilities. Also, we want to keep Nixpkgs maintainable and merging anything certainly doesn't help with that.
Committers are trusted members of our community and that trust establishes by them contributing over a longer time with high quality contributions. I don't want to say that you would do something negative, but maybe you understand our intentions. It's not directly against you, but 4 days after contributing to Nixpkgs is way too early.

[kaynetik]

but 4 days after contributing to Nixpkgs

100% agree - I had a wrong approach, as I came to this for a point of view of someone who fell in love with nix-darwin 3 years ago. And since then, as is natural, I've migrated all my workflows to nix derivatives.
Before I opened the PR I should have done some due diligence to see what's required...

they can merge whatever

I see that, but I'm also pretty public and vocal about security, so I never saw myself as one of the supply/MITM source, but the point is valid.

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And as I said, I think one the time is right, someone else from the community will nominate me - hence the statement "a few years down the line".

@leona-ya also, I sincerely appreciate the feedback 🙏🏻

[alyssais]

I'd like to encourage people reacting with 👎 to committer applications to consider what that might feel like for the applicant, to whom the reason is unlikely to be obvious. If you have concerns, please try to either explain them to the applicant, or reach out to the core team.

[kaynetik]

unlikely to be obvious

Was far from obvious for me; but then I spent a couple of hours reading of past experiences, expectations, and the documentation. What followed was a facepalm combined with pure shame moment 😂

This isn't gonna discourage me; I'm aware it takes immense effort to join such an OSS community as nix is. And given that I would never give up on the initial idea, eventually it's just a matter of time.

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I'm finally at a point in my career where I can easily spend hour or two per day on open source in any shape or form, and I was just too eager to join what I love. @alyssais

[r-vdp]

Also note that you don't need commit access to be a maintainer of packages that you're interested in.
As a maintainer you'd create PRs for updates (if the bot didn't do so yet), review PRs that affect the packages you maintain, check and react to issues, etc. We definitely need more active maintainers in this project.
Besides packages, you can also maintain nixos modules.
Being an active maintainer is also the main road to potentially becoming a committer later (and committers are generally also maintainers of several packages and/or parts of nixos).

[kaynetik]

Yep, that I already started. Realized that entry points are rather narrow, so I'll accept what I'm given.

maintain nixos modules

Currently actively testing in a homelab to gain confidence, and not steer towards llm-assisted mess.

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Essentially what happened for me just due to the fact that I tried to join the committers group was that I've had to do much more research, and in turn that further enhanced my overall NixOS understanding. 🎉 @r-vdp