Contributor documentation

@philiptaron and @wolfgangwalther are admins of this repository, while everybody in @NixOS/nixpkgs-ci has write access, as well as @infinisil and @willbush.

Development

Enter the development environment in this directory either automatically with direnv or manually with

nix-shell

The most important tools and commands in this environment are:

Linting:

cargo clippy --all-targets

Optionally, check out extra lints or uncomment them at the top of main.rs.

cargo clippy --all-targets -- -W clippy::nursery -W clippy::pedantic

Integration tests are declared in ./tests as subdirectories imitating Nixpkgs with these files:

main: A Nixpkgs root directory with:
- default.nix: Always contains
```
import <test-nixpkgs> { root = ./.; }
```
  which makes
```
nix-instantiate <subdir> --eval -A <attr> --arg overlays <overlays>
```
  work very similarly to the real Nixpkgs, just enough for the program to be able to test it.
- pkgs/by-name: The pkgs/by-name directory to check.
- pkgs/top-level/all-packages.nix (optional): Contains an overlay of the form
```
self: super: {
  # ...
}
```
  allowing the simulation of package overrides to the real pkgs/top-level/all-packages.nix. The default is an empty overlay.
base (optional): Contains another Nixpkgs root directory with potentially any of the above structures. This is used to test ratchet checks.
expected (optional): A file containing the expected standard output. The default is expecting an empty standard output.

This file is matched against the error almost literally, with the only exception being that the @REDACTED@ string can match anything, which is useful for non-deterministic errors.

Releases are automatically created when the version field in Cargo.toml is updated from a push to the main branch.