This is a tool for reviewing large Nixpkgs pull requests such as GNOME updates. All review information are tracked in commit messages.
If you use Nix flakes, you can just run nix run github:jtojnar/nonemast in your local Nixpkgs checkout.
With stable Nix, you will need to use nix-shell -I 'nonemast=https://github.com/jtojnar/nonemast/archive/main.tar.gz' -p '((import <nonemast>).packages.${builtins.currentSystem}.nonemast)' --run nonemast instead.
Nixpkgs GNOME maintainers have the following workflow: When an alpha of a new GNOME release is published, they use update.nix script to automatically bump all GNOME packages in Nixpkgs on the gnome branch. After that, they walk through the commits, reading the release notes and modifying the package expressions as necessary. To have clean Git history where each commit points to a non-broken tree, maintainers push fixup/squash commits. Those are then periodically integrated by rebasing with auto-squashing.
To keep track of which updates were already reviewed without modifying commits under other maintainers’ feet, the branch is append only most of the time. The review is acknowledged by creating an empty squash commit with git commit --squash «commit-id» --allow-empty -m "Changelog-Reviewed-By: $USER".
But that would make it easy to miss some review commit far from the original commit in the Git log. The Git’s notes feature offers a similar annotation feature but it is even more obscure than rebase, harder to use with multiple users due to the need to deal with merges, and rebasing disconnects the notes from commits.
This tool allows maintainers to preview Git log as if it was auto-squashed and additionally highlights the reviewed commits visually.
We use Meson build system so you can configure, build, test and run it as usual:
meson setup _build
meson compile -C _build
meson test -C _build
meson devenv -C _build/ nonemast /path/to/nixpkgsThe code is formatted with Black, you can run meson compile -C _build lint-fix to enforce the formatting.
We include Nix developement environment so you can just run nix-shell in the project directory (or nix develop with flakes) to enter a shell with all the dependencies installed.
The code is licensed under MIT.
