NixOS
Are more maintainers needed for this repo?
Hey @domenkozar and others, I've noticed several issues and approved PRs growing old in this repo. I realize that it may not be as high a priority other parts of the nix project, but I do think the health of this repo is important for helping folks adopt templates. Does this repo need additional maintainers to help lighten the load? I'd be happy to volunteer.
I'm happy to hand out access to merge things if there's a core team for templates. Maybe this should be coordinated with @NixOS/documentation-team
We discussed this in today's team meeting, and don't consider maintaining templates in the responsibility of the documentation team. Also we're in general still focusing on foundational issues with the team, such that actively documenting flakes (and other experimental features) is effectively out of scope.
Weren't flakes supposed to decentralize this? That way it's each project's own responsibility to maintain a template. A few of those would end up in nixpkgs, as that's where a lot of language infrastructure is defined. To me that seems like a good thing, because there the templates at least stand a chance of being noticed by language infrastructure maintainers.
Full disclosure: I'm not a fan of templates because they don't compose. It's one of the reasons why flake.parts exists. My first problem statement was actually to solve template composition, as one possible solution to make project setup easier, but then I realised that it's more useful to make the templated thing compose in the first place.
This issue has been mentioned on NixOS Discourse. There might be relevant details there:
https://discourse.nixos.org/t/2023-07-17-documentation-team-meeting-notes-64/30653/1
Either more maintainers should be added(I volunteer) or the repo should be deleted because it has out of date info and doesn't have best practices.
Perhaps some templates could be references to templates in other repositories, instead of copies. Those repositories tend to already have templates that are maintained there. Meanwhile this repository can keep serving a role for discoverability, to help users like saolof; see https://github.com/NixOS/templates/issues/69#issuecomment-1745596641.