Nominate @ethancedwards8

[ethancedwards8]

I would like to nominate myself for commit access.

Just to give a bit of background, I am a first-year at Harvard studying Computer Science+Math. I started using Nix in middle school around 5 years ago but was not super active in high school. I have resumed my activity in the past year. I hope to be a release editor next cycle, and a manager the cycle after that.

Additionally, I was a participant in the 2025 Summer of Nix program where I worked on Ngipkgs. There, I worked on NixOS modules, the custom overview that we wrote for Ngipkgs, the NixOS test framework, and more.

I'm pretty active in the Python ecosystem + some random area where I maintain a few packages (ocaml, tmux). Additionally, I am an active Darwin maintainer as I (unfortunately) pretty much have to use a MacBook for school. I do still maintain a NixOS machine on the side, however. Historically, I have been active in packaging Pentesting tools NixOS/nixpkgs#81418 and packaging games NixOS/nixpkgs#380688

One of my goals with commit access is to pickup a lot of older, forgotten PRs. I routinely sort PRs by age and amount of comments and review old PRs that have not been touched in several months. From there, I often have to ping a committer to merge them. With commit access, I will be able to streamline this workflow better.

I also have a few articles on my website relating to using Nix: https://ethancedwards.com/

• Installing NixOS on LVM on LUKS
• A nixpkgs contributor's guide to using Git Rebase
• Building Nix Systems with GitHub Actions and Cachix

Outside of Nix, I maintain Dracula Tmux, a fairly popular (750+ GitHub Stars) highly customizable Tmux plugin. I love Linux and Free Software.

Stats:

Repology states I maintain around 250 packages. This is somewhat misleading as I'm on the ngi-nix team so that inflates my count, although I did heavily contribute to many of the packages. From a simple ripgrep of the repo, I maintain around 100 packages. I estimate the real number to be around ~150.

From nixpkgs-committer:

• 195 PRs merged
• 1200+ PRs reviewed

[wolfgangwalther]

Thank you for your contributions! We appreciate the work you’re doing in the project and your high level of activity.

Based on our current assessment, we feel that your review activity doesn’t quite meet the standards of communication, focus on substantive matters, and adherence to documented guidelines that we’d expect from committers just yet.

In general, we think the primary responsibilities of a committer are good communication and good judgement – so we’d hope to see reviews that explain their requests and clearly distinguish optional or subjective nits from substantive technical issues, to focus more on the latter especially in the absence of consensus and documentation, to help new contributors educate themselves on the project norms, and to work positively towards a resolution when disagreements arise. We think the communication and review style of committers is very important, as it is a big factor in what changes get merged, represents many new contributors’ first interaction with the project, and sets the tone that other contributors learn from.

We’ve reached out privately with more feedback, per our guidelines, and would be happy to review another application at a later date.