66% of Nixpkgs are up-to-date
Just wanted to congratulate everyone for all of the work in keeping Nixpkgs up-to-date!
Repology has just updated our stats and we have shown significant improvement. 66% of nixpkgs-unstable packages are up-to-date, with a total of 6112 up-to-date packages1. Nixpkgs is slowly growing to match package sets that come in many of the big Linux distros. We now have more up-to-date packages than rolling release distros Arch (5924) and Manjaro (5708)! We certainly have a ways to go to compete with heavyweights like FreeBSD Ports (15410), DragonFly BSD Ports (14268), and Debian (14915) but these are ancient projects that have had a huge headstart. We are definitely making progress and it’s visible in the Repology graphs2.
For comparison, in February, nixpkgs-unstable had 60% of packages up-to-date, with a total of 5439 up-to-date packages3. This kind of progress over 1 month is tremendously helpful. Remember that most of these updates will be included in 18.09, not the soon to be release 18.03. This protects users from potentially breaking changes as well as giving maintainers plenty of time to verify that the updates have not had any negative effects.
Ryan Mulligan’s nix-update has made updating packages much easier and I think it will be a game changer for Nixpkgs in the long run. There are still some kinks in it but I think it is slowly getting better. It has certainly been a headache to handle the huge increase in pull requests, but we are slowly clearing through that glut of outdated software. If an update to nixpkgs-unstable breaks something for you, please be sure to open an issue.