NixOS Ocean Sprint 2021 Report

Participants' summary:

• Amon helped making test-driver modular, refactored its logging and used a link checker on nixos.org.

• Nejc converted nix.dev from RST to markdown, tried different ways to run NixOS tests on macOS.

• Jonas looked into voting systems with Bernardo. He also benchmarked nixpkgs and overlays to see their impact.

• Dario worked on fixing certain Darwin packages and then made a mkDerivation specialized for building kernel modules.

• Robert worked on NixOS a la carte, with the goal of making NixOS modules more modular and faster.

• Thu helped make test-driver a proper Python package, looked into reducing number of NixOS modules to speed up evaluation and reducing live iso closure.

• Florian worked on nix-casync, an alternative binary cache protocol to NARs to help us reduce bandwidth and storage.

• Janne and Andreas worked on switch-to-configuration.pl refactoring and mariadb restructuring.

• Jacek and Marjan drove the test-driver refactoring and finished off makeBinaryWrapper pull request.

• Domen assisted Nejc on nix.dev rewrite to Markdown and helped with attempts to run NixOS tests on macOS. I also launched Cachix Deploy private beta at the sprint and showed a short demo.

Further details:

• https://niteo.co/blog/sprints-are-back/
• https://blog.helsinki-systems.de/nixos-ocean-sprint-retrospective/
• https://galowicz.de/2021/12/12/nix-community-oceansprint-report/
• https://blog.cachix.org/posts/2021-12-17-nixos-ocean-sprint-wrap-up/