For a considerable time, I had aspired to become a package maintainer for a Linux distribution. Encouraged by my recent and positive encounters with NixOS and its community, I decided to take the plunge by maintaining a Nix package. In this post, I aim to share the valuable lessons I learned during my first package contribution. However, it’s essential to note that for a comprehensive set of guidelines, one should always refer to the CONTRIBUTING.md document. The content of this post may appear basic to some, and most of these insights are drawn from my experience with this Pull Request and the CONTRIBUTING.md guidelines.

Package

Naming

If the package you’re adding has a name that conflicts with an existing package in nixpkgs, endeavor to give your package a meaningful and distinct name. In my case, the package I attempted to add was named “slurm,” which had a naming conflict with an existing package. As suggested in my Pull Request, I ultimately named the package “slurm-nm” to clarify that it is a network monitoring tool.

Placement

The package should be located within the new hierarchical structure, following the path pkgs/by-name/sl/slurm-cli/package.nix. There’s no longer a need to include it at the top-level for it to function correctly.

Build

Once the package is correctly placed, build it from the root of the project using nix-build -A package-name, and then verify that the package located at result/bin/package functions as expected.

Contents

Ensure that the package does not contain any trailing whitespace, and there should be at most one newline between statements. If the buildPhase and installPhase do not perform any actions, you can exclude them from the derivation file. Additionally, the meta section in the file should provide information about the license, maintainer, and, in this case, the main program for the derivation. During this process, I learned that license.gpl2 is deprecated in favor of license.gpl2Plus and license.gpl2Only.

Commit Rules

Adding Yourself as a Maintainer

If you have never committed anything to nixpkgs before, you should add yourself as a maintainer to the maintainer-list.nix file following the structure below:

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    handle = {
      # Required
      name = "Your name";

      # Optional, but at least one of email, matrix, or githubId must be given
      email = "address@example.org";
      matrix = "@user:example.org";
      github = "GithubUsername";
      githubId = your-github-id;

      keys = [{
        fingerprint = "AAAA BBBB CCCC DDDD EEEE  FFFF 0000 1111 2222 3333";
      }];
    };

This addition to the maintainer-list must be in alphabetical order. The commit adding yourself to this list should adhere to the guidelines and, therefore, have a commit message like “maintainers: add mikaelfangel”. Importantly, this commit MUST precede a commit that adds the package. If the commit ordering is incorrect, use git rebase -i to reorder the commits. Once done, use git push --force-with-lease to push the changes.

Adding the Package

When adding the package, the commit message should follow the format “package-name: init at version”. For example, “slurm: init at 0.4.4”.

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