Nice.

Here’s another worked example of a less adventurous pi pico (W) project I did recently. It’s C, built with Nix, and doesn’t require setting up all the hardware-debugger stuff (it uses the much simpler hold-bootsel-while-plugging-in and copy-the-.uf2-file mechanism to load code). The 5th commit is the simple blink example from the SDK with all the build mechanisms figured out.

Bumping package versions usually isn’t hard. Here, I’ll do this one out loud here, & maybe you can do it next time you need to:

1. Search https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pulls to see if someone else already has a PR open for a version bump for this package.
2. Clone the nixpkgs repo if you haven’t already: git clone https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs.git ~/devel/nixpkgs (or git pull if you have).
3. Create a branch for this bump: git checkout -b stremio
4. Find stremio: find pkgs -name stremio
5. Edit it: $EDITOR pkgs/applications/video/stremio/default.nix Looks like nixpkgs has version 4.4.142. If I go to https://www.stremio.com/ (link in meta.homepage in this file) and click ‘Download’, it all says 4.4, which is not helpful. The ‘source code’ link goes to github, and the ‘tags’ link there lists version v4.4.164, which is what we’re looking for.
6. In my editor, I change the version: 4.4.142 → 4.4.164.
7. In my editor, I mess up both the hashes: I just add a block of zeros somewhere in the middle: sha256-OyuTFmEIC8PH4PDzTMn8ibLUAzJoPA/fTILee0xpgQI= → sha256-OyuTFmEIC80000000000000000000A/fTILee0xpgQI=.
8. Leaving my editor, I build the updated package: nix-build . -A stremio
9. It fails, because the hashes are wrong, obviously. But it tells me what hash it got, which I copy/paste back in, in the spirit of collective TOFU. I do this twice, once for each hash.
10. It builds successfully. I test the result: ./result/bin/stremio. Looks like it works enough to prompt me to log in, at least. I don’t know what stremio is or have an account, but it’s probably fine.
11. I commit my change: git commit -a -m 'stremio: 4.4.142 -> 4.4.164'
12. I push my commit: git push github (If this is your first time, create a fork of nixpkgs in the github web UI & git remote add a remote for it first)
13. I create PR in the github web UI: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/263387

I use Nix (not yet NixOS) on a Librem 5. Debian stable is so old, so it’s nice to have Nix as an alternative.

I ran Gentoo for ~15 years and then switched to NixOS ~3 years ago. The last straw was Gentoo bug 676264, where I submitted version bump & build fix patches to fix security issues and was ignored for three months.

In Gentoo, glsa-check only tells you about security vulnerabilities after there’s a portage update that would resolve it. I.e., for those three months, all Gentoo users had a ghostscript with widely-known vulnerabilities and glsa-check was silent about it. I’m not cherry-picking this example—this was one of my first attempts to help be proactive about security updates & found that the process is not fit for purpose. And most fixed vulnerabilities don’t even get GLSA advisories—the advisories have to be created manually. Awhile back, I had made a ‘gentle update’ script that just updated packages glsa-check complained about. It turns out that’s not very useful.

Contrast this with vulnix, a tool in Nix/NixOS which directly fetches the vulnerability database from nvd.nist.gov (with appropriate polite local caching) and directly checks locally installed software against it. You don’t need the Nix project to do anything for this to Just Work; it’s always comprehensive. I made a NixOS upgrade script that uses vulnix to show me a diff of security issues as it does a channel update. Example output:

commit ...
Author: <me>
Date:   Sat Jun 17 2023

    New pins for security fixes

    -9.8    CVE-2023-34152  imagemagick
    -7.8    CVE-2023-34153  imagemagick
    -7.5    CVE-2023-32067  c-ares
    -7.5    CVE-2023-28319  curl
    -7.5    CVE-2023-2650   openssl
    -7.5    CVE-2023-2617   opencv
    -7.5    CVE-2023-0464   openssl
    -6.5    CVE-2023-31147  c-ares
    -6.5    CVE-2023-31124  c-ares
    -6.5    CVE-2023-1972   binutils
    -6.4    CVE-2023-31130  c-ares
    -5.9    CVE-2023-32570  dav1d
    -5.9    CVE-2023-28321  curl
    -5.9    CVE-2023-28320  curl
    -5.9    CVE-2023-1255   openssl
    -5.5    CVE-2023-34151  imagemagick
    -5.5    CVE-2023-32324  cups
    -5.3    CVE-2023-0466   openssl
    -5.3    CVE-2023-0465   openssl
    -3.7    CVE-2023-28322  curl

diff --git a/channels b/channels
--- a/channels
+++ b/channels
@@ -8,23 +8,23 @@ [nixos]
 git_repo = https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs.git
 git_ref = release-23.05
-git_revision = 3a70dd92993182f8e514700ccf5b1ae9fc8a3b8d
-release_name = nixos-23.05.419.3a70dd92993
-tarball_url = https://releases.nixos.org/nixos/23.05/nixos-23.05.419.3a70dd92993/nixexprs.tar.xz
-tarball_sha256 = 1e3a214cb6b0a221b3fc0f0315bc5fcc981e69fec9cd5d8a9db847c2fae27907
+git_revision = c7ff1b9b95620ce8728c0d7bd501c458e6da9e04
+release_name = nixos-23.05.1092.c7ff1b9b956
+tarball_url = https://releases.nixos.org/nixos/23.05/nixos-23.05.1092.c7ff1b9b956/nixexprs.tar.xz
+tarball_sha256 = 8b32a316eb08c567aa93b6b0e1622b1cc29504bc068e5b1c3af8a9b81dafcd12