This Week in Spectrum, 2025-W27

Alyssa Ross
2025-07-07T10:49:12Z

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This week was the beginning of an unusually problematic Nixpkgs staging
cycle, which required quite a lot of my attention to try to keep
Spectrum buildable. There's sadly more to do, as I've just noticed a
newly introduced crosvm segfault… I also put some time into a Nixpkgs
policy proposal to try to move towards better package quality and
maintenance[1].

When I've had gaps from working on that, I've continued working on the
networking fixes I've been mentioning for the last couple of weeks.
They're now extremely close to done, and I was already able to push
some improvements[2][3][4] to our integration test framework (which I
continue to be delighted to now have).

There was a discussion[5] on the list about how to reduce the volume of
spam coming through. I've made some changes based on that now, and also
sent some Nixpkgs PRs to fix some issues I found in the NixOS
SpamAssassin module. Since those changes, nothing has come through that
shouldn't have, but we'll see how it goes from here…

[1]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/421201
[2]: https://spectrum-os.org/git/spectrum/commit/?id=f8eca3ab3d8e59dd49be7b81735c861330c45b4c
[3]: https://spectrum-os.org/git/spectrum/commit/?id=048d4033736443efd7a53340e7555eb0852dea09
[4]: https://spectrum-os.org/git/spectrum/commit/?id=93afadc8ed1fe508ca1021346d15e50aadef2f17
[5]: https://spectrum-os.org/lists/archives/spectrum-discuss/uvn7j3n4fppxeqjof4l24koexz47sljjqzyyypruyuarosqlr3@5epcn2tb5i4l/

Demi's Cloud Hypervisor soundness fixes[6] are basically done for now,
and are mostly waiting for review from other reviewers. She also sent
a second version of her patch to run PipeWire in Spectrum application
VMs[7], although I believe there's a third version still to come, and
while at it sent an upstream MR[8] with some security fixes for PipeWire!

[6]: https://github.com/cloud-hypervisor/cloud-hypervisor/pull/7129
[7]: https://spectrum-os.org/lists/archives/spectrum-devel/a951f755-3e7d-4236-9353-3419ce96a481@gmail.com/
[8]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/merge_requests/2423

With all the conferences and working on future funding I've been doing
recently (which has calmed down a bit for now), I might need to take it
easy for a bit to be proactive about burnout. Not sure how that'll look
exactly yet, although it's unlikely I'll spend any time /completely/
away to make sure the project keeps ticking along. See you next week!

Upstream Nixpkgs PRs from me, relevant to Spectrum
--------------------------------------------------

https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/421760
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/421796
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/421797
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/421798
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/422001
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/422003
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/422018
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/422913
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/422916
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/422973

Upstream contributions from me, relevant to Spectrum
----------------------------------------------------