Another call for Darwin maintainers

[toonn]

We have a darwin-maintainers team, which is currently hovering around 50 members.

If you'd like to join the team, we're looking for help with the following:

• Review and test open PRs
• Participate in reducing the number of failing darwin packages
• Respond when NixOS/darwin-maintainers is pinged on an issue/PR that you are knowledgeable about

Requirements for joining are minimal. We take a look at issues/PRs you've been involved in to make sure you are helpful and respectful rather than disruptive or rude.
Comments on issues that help confirm they're a problem are just as valid as PRs fixing popular packages. If you have a hard time contributing to the project in this way, a history of productive discussion on the NixOS Discourse or a similarly easily accessible place for public discussion can be considered.

You're welcome to join the Nix on MacOS community on Matrix whether or not you join the team.

If you want to help out but don't have access to aarch64-darwin hardware you can request access to the Darwin build box. Note that it's shared hardware so communicate in the Matrix room when you're doing stdenv rebuilds for a while. A great big thanks to @winterqt for starting that initiative and the Infra team for keeping it going!

Feel free to nominate yourself and help use bring macOS into a better state : )

This is a spiritual successor to #145230, thank you, Domen, for improving the state of Darwin support so far.

[zimbatm]

Thanks for the initiative @toonn. Until something official gets set up, I will take Domen's place to add new members.

[toonn]

Thank you, Jonas!

I went through the tail end of the previous issue up to the first person already part of the team.

@cidkidnix, @khaneliman, @iFreilicht, @heywoodlh, @DontEatOreo, @siriobalmelli, @matteo-pacini and @afh, welcome to the team.

[afh]

Thank you @toonn and @zimbatm, very much appreciated! Happy to be part of the team 😃

[Guanran928]

I have two x86_64-darwin machines, I'm interested in helping whenever I can :)

[zimbatm]

Added @Guanran928, welcome to the team!

[juliusrickert]

I'm running Nix on aarch64-darwin machines with nix-darwin and home-manager. I'd like to support maintaining Nix on macOS. :)

(I'd happily support Nixpkgs, not only on macOS-related topics. I don't know anything about the processes for "applying" to help.)

[Mic92]

Btw. If the maintainer of nix-darwin wants get builder for their CI, in nix-community we should have enough builder capacity by now. Just drop by in our matrix channel. I now also have macOS laptop so I can test/port my software to it as you can see from my projects like this: nix-community/srvos#441

[emilazy]

Thanks for the offer @Mic92! We currently don’t have elaborate enough testing in nix-darwin for it to really be worthwhile but VM tests is something we’ve tried working towards before, so it might be helpful for us in future.

[donn]

I can help out a bit on the weekends 🙂

[Aleksanaa]

Please also onboard me. I borrowed aarch64-darwin.
(from a friend in high school who cannot use her computer on weekdays)
(having strict parents is not a bad thing, lol)

[kashw2]

I'd be happy to help out using the community darwin builder for the moment before I'm able to get myself a darwin system sometime soon.

[thecaralice]

I have an aarch64-darwin and I have fixed some packages on darwin, would be glad to help

[winterqt]

We currently don’t have elaborate enough testing in nix-darwin for it to really be worthwhile but VM tests is something we’ve tried working towards before, so it might be helpful for us in future.

@emilazy I actually wrote a scriptable VM harness that I planned to PR to nix-darwin at some point, but life got in the way. If you'd like, I can definitely throw up the code somewhere, for inspiration if nothing else?

[emilazy]

@winterqt Sure, that would be great to see! I know @Enzime put work into this too; IIRC the hard parts involved automating macOS installation in AArch64 VMs. I wanted to try and keep similar code paths on x86_64-darwin and aarch64-darwin which seemed like it might be tricky at the time, but it was quite a while ago so the virtualization situation might be simpler now. And of course there’s Apple’s draconian licensing limits on concurrent VMs we’d have to consider that would be an inherent bottleneck unless we can use multiple physical machines.

That said, we should probably keep this issue focused on people joining the Darwin maintainers team – I’m available in #nix-darwin-dev:matrix.org or via email if you want to share what you got working.

[zimbatm]

I gave @toonn team maintainer so he can add existing org members himself.

Added @donn as he isn't an org member yet!

[toonn]

Invited @juliusrickert, @Aleksanaa, @kashw2 and @thecaralice.

Welcome to the team!

[eliandoran]

@toonn , I would like to be part of this as well.

I only have a x86-64_darwin, but I would like to help with reviews and fixing build errors.

[tko]

How does one test PRs? Wouldn't trust my comments on reviews but I could at least try build some.

[Aleksanaa]

How does one test PRs? Wouldn't trust my comments on reviews but I could at least try build some.

If you are mentioned or asked to review, you will most likely be asked to test on darwin, modify dependencies and add common workarounds. But normally you just need to add some packages under darwin.apple_sdk according to the build failure.

[tko]

But normally you just need to add some packages under darwin.apple_sdk according to the build failure.

How does one do that exactly? Asking for link to docs.

(I kind of understand how to get home-manager install packages, but getting specific packages from different sources is beyond me.)

[toonn]

@eliandoran, invited. Welcome to the team!

@tko, testing PRs is most conveniently done using nixpkgs-review. Though to actually give approval you should review the code changes.

[yzx9]

I am currently dedicating my time to this in my aarch64_darwin, even though I'm still a noob. If that's okay, I would love to be a part of this.

[toonn]

@yzx9, invited. Welcome to the team!

Experience is appreciated but not a requirement as long as I have some interactions on issues/PRs to gauge whether or not someone's been helpful.

[fidgetingbits]

I'm happy to help with this. Been running nix on an M1 for a little while.

[toonn]

@shivaraj-bh, invited. Welcome to the team!

[jwiegley]

Hello, I would like to help also. I have both Intel and M1 macOS machines.

[toonn]

@jwiegley, invited. Welcome to the team!

(I made heavy use of your Nix setup for Haskell when I started out, thank you! <3)

[szlend]

@toonn Happy to help out where I can. I've been hacking on darwin for a while now, especially on cross-compilation support to Linux targets.

[toonn]

@szlend, invited. Welcome to the team!

[kdhingra307]

Hi, i have a mac-arm with nixpkgs and flakes setup. I am happy to provide support where-ever i can

[gshpychka]

I would like to participate, but need some direction - what exactly does reviewing/testing PRs involve? I'm mainly asking because build errors are already being caught by CI/ofborg

[emilazy]

The ofborg Darwin builders are usually overloaded, so even being able to run nixpkgs-review and test the results is valuable. However, ideally you’d know the basics of how to package things for Darwin on Nixpkgs so that you can help resolve common errors like forgetting Darwin‐only dependencies or needing to conditionalize Linux‐only ones.

[krad246]

Likewise, I really like porting Nix on MacOS, got some cool stuff like Linux builders setup and I'd like to update unions-fuse for example

[toonn]

@kdhingra307, your first PR looks good but I'd like to see another interaction or two, could you ping again when you've had more interactions on issues, PRs or Discourse or similar?

@krad246, you don't need to be part of darwin-maintainers to contribute, in fact that's a prerequisite to joining. The main purpose of the team is to be a point of contact for contributors that run into Darwin-related issues. Check the paragraph in the OP mentioning "Requirements." Ping again when you've had a couple interactions in issues/PRs/Discourse to join the team.

@gshpychka, passing your name to zimbatm. Welcome to the team!

[isabelroses]

Hello, I'm isabel, and i would like to become a darwin maintainer. I have 30 merged PRs and have reviewed 72 merged PRs. And have a m1 darwin machine that I'm happy to test some PRs on.

[toonn]

@isabelroses, invited. Welcome to the team!

[uncenter]

Hi, would love to help out! I have 31 merged PRs and have reviewed 41 PRs. My primary machine is an M1 MBP and I test most PRs on it, though I do occasionally review on my NixOS WSL machine.

[toonn]

@uncenter, invited. Welcome to the team!

[sstubbs]

Hi, Nix has been so refreshing keeping things consistent between my NixOS desktop and M2 MBP. So I would be happy to help in anyway I can if people are still needed.

[toonn]

@sstubbs, I asked org owners to invite you since you weren't part of the NixOS org yet. lassulus responded so I think you should have an invite.

When looking at your contributions I saw an open issue and PR that were left over after you submitted another PR obsoleting the first. Do try to include fixes/closes keywords in your commits or at least mention the PR number in issues/PRs that are related so things don't end up in a state of limbo.

Welcome to the team!

[sstubbs]

Thank you @toonn I have joined and will make sure to clean up other related issues/PRs going forward when needed.

[niklaskorz]

I'd be happy to help review and fix darwin packages as well.
I recently fixed zed-editor on darwin, which went through a few iterations until it settled on the new Apple SDK pattern (currently in staging-next).
I'm maintaining five packages, four of which are now running on darwin and the other being a Flutter package (so bringing that to darwin is currently blocked by the Nix Flutter toolchain being Linux-only).
I also try to provide (upstream) patches improving the build experience on darwin for Nix packages I'm not maintaining.

[nixos-discourse]

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

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/the-darwin-sdks-have-been-updated/55295/26

[samrose]

I am interested in helping review and fix darwin packages. I maintain some postgresql extension packages, and pgrx Rust packages that have darwin aarch64 compatibility in my own work. So I'd like to help out on the broader set of packages too. I am also trying to help the postgres foundation adopt nix, and have some darwin support.

[azuwis]

I would like to become a Darwin maintainer.

• Have 97 merged PRs
• Create and maintain Darwin only packages: sketchybar blueutil
• Initial Darwin support for packages: moonlight-qt, MIDIVisualizer, sslh, zsh-fzf-tab
• Various Darwin build fixes or improvements: kitty, mpv, rtorrent, torch, soundfile, python-rtmidi, etc.
• Fix pytorch performance problem on aarch64-darwin python3Packages.torch: Fix performance problem on darwin #220017
• Fix the swift Hydra build problem (broken for 5 months), swift: Workaround Hydra darwin build problem #354192

and have been daily using nix+nix-darwin on an aarch64-darwin machine since 2021.

[toonn]

@niklaskorz, @samrose, @azuwis, invited. Welcome to the team!