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by paulgdp 811 days ago
NixOS uses a monorepo and I think everyone loves it.

I love being able to easily grep through all the packages source code, and there's regularly PRs that harmonizes conventions across many packages.

Nixpkgs doesn't include the packaged software source code, so it's a lot more practical than what Debian is doing.

Creating a whole distribution often requires changes synchronized across many packages, so it really makes things simpler.

https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs

I think it's important to add that they both have the biggest number of packaged software and the most up-to-date software of all distributions even though they have far fewer maintainers than Debian.

https://repology.org/repositories/graphs
3 comments
viraptor 811 days ago
Is nixpkgs really a monorepo as usually discussed? It's got packages, os modules, and some supporting scripts. Nix itself lives in a different place, so does the RFC planning, system artwork and a few other things. I would expect it all together to become a monorepo.

> even though they have far fewer maintainers than Debian.

Debian has ~1.5k contributors, nixpkgs lists >3.5k maintainers. (Although that list is not pruned over time)

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paulgdp 811 days ago
> Is nixpkgs really a monorepo as usually discussed? It's got packages, os modules, and some supporting scripts. Nix itself lives in a different place, so does the RFC planning, system artwork and a few other things. I would expect it all together to become a monorepo.

I think we can say it's a monorepo of packages in this context. Not everything from the Nix ecosystem is there. It could also bundle the website, wiki, doc etc but I don't think it matter too much.

> Debian has ~1.5k contributors, nixpkgs lists >3.5k maintainers. (Although that list is not pruned over time)

Thanks for the info, I heard that a long time ago and never checked myself! It's probably less as you say but still probably bigger than Debian.

I guess it makes sense because it's so much easier to contribute there than to Debian.

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bjornsing 811 days ago
> Nixpkgs doesn't include the packaged software source code, so it's a lot more practical than what Debian is doing.

This is the key difference. OpenWRT is a “monorepo” too, but it downloads tar balls etc of the upstream software. Makes sense.

Putting the source code of the upstream software in a monorepo sounds like a nightmare…

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thegeekpirate 811 days ago
> I think it's important to add that they both have the biggest number of packaged software and the most up-to-date software of all distributions even though they have far fewer maintainers than Debian.

Only because of https://www.reddit.com/r/NixOS/comments/zp95a2/comment/j5ko9...

I also had plenty of issues with either packages not being available or not building, last I tried. At least with the AUR, it's generally only the latter you have to worry about ;)

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paulgdp 811 days ago
Yeah, automation in Nixpkgs is crazy and goes far beyond any other distros (that I know of).

Why spend manual time when it can be automated?

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