Théophane Hufschmitt

Present the newly created Nix team, and give a glimpse at the Nix development process.

Nix has for a long time been struggling with a very low (~1) bus factor and a lack of clear development process, leading to some frustration from both users and contributors.

To remedy that, we've recently created the Nix team with the goal of collectively “tak(ing) ownership of the Nix source code”.

This talk presents that Nix team, and gives a glimpse at the Nix development process.

Introduction and welcome to the Nix and NixOS devroom.

Other people: Bryan Honof JulienMalka raitobezarius Matthew Croughan

Making Nix follow the principle of least privilege by removing as much as possible the need to it to run as root

In multi-user mode, the Nix daemon is expected to run as root. This is quite annoying from a security point of view as the Nix codebase is (somewhat) large and not properly audited. Because of that it is also an adoption blocker in some places. I turns out that there's very few places where Nix actually needs to be root, and we can remove or isolate these, as done in https://github.com/NixOS/nix/pull/5380.