ok so here’s the story: before i was writing “Packaging Multiple Dependent Python Modules Using Hatch & Nix”, i was trying to package my website’s “backend”. unfortunately, i hit a stumbling block more stumble-y than i ever could have anticipated: one of the key Python dependencies I relied on (the Sanic webserver) was unmaintained in nixpkgs, crashing w/ a ModuleNotFoundError 🙀
fortunately, i know nix{pkgs} now, so i was capable of resolving the problem. tho i might as well update Sanic while i was at it. and add myself as maintainer for the things I touched. and add that sanic-ext package i need for my backend too. oh wait yeah that third one right.
What Does Being A Maintainer Mean??
All it means is, I will automatically get pinged if someone opens a PR to make changes to these packages in the future :) Doesn’t mean I have commit privileges yet! Tho, staring down the never-ending deluge of PRs that crash against nixpkgs daily, I’m not sure I want to really? It’s a lot of power, but also a lot of responsibility (
). Participating in the process for what happens if your PR drops off the first couple pages (you apologetically post in a Matrix room and a committer very graciously merges it) has been humbling, really reinforces that this is a community effort to make this thing run as smoothly as it does. Now that I’ve taken a closer look at the gears, I am more awe-struck than ever; there is such a massive amount of labor put into this project, for free, in people spare time, because they believe in it, just like I did. Something special, I think :)
As for why I waited until my last PR was merged (which took about 2 weeks), instead of when my maintainership status was official (2 weeks ago, just 3 minutes from PR to merge, surely some sort of record) to make this post? Well, ya know, girls be silly sometimes :P