[GaetanLepage]

Hi!

I'd like to nominate Ethan (@ethancedwards8). He has been a very prolific nixpkgs contributor and, according to me, deserves the commit bit.

I had the chance to work closely with him during the past few years. I remember reviewing some of his initial contributions. He has been very diligent and curious to learn and live up to the nixpkgs standards.
Since then, he gained full autonomy and developed strong technical skills. He was able to contribute to several areas of nixpkgs.
He's also willing to review others' PRs and provide great feedback.

	#	# excluding @r-ryantm
PRs authored	762	N/A
PRs authored & merged	644	N/A
PRs reviewed	1000	1000
PRs otherwise commented	301	196
PRs otherwise involved	989	583
Issues authored	17	N/A
Issues otherwise commented	53	N/A
Issues otherwise involved	36	N/A

^{Generated with https://gist.github.com/pbsds/7af827a53c103cd3d40902f9b0b21843.}

I'd like to add that he has recently joined the CUDA team. He has been a really helpful and serious collaborator there too.

I am extremely confident in endorsing Ethan as a nixpkgs committer.

cc @ConnorBaker

[GrimmTheShrimp]

they maintain a few too many slop packages, and quite a bit of their reviews is trivial-ish nixpkgs-review spam (which also has security implications with auto-approve allowing merge bot once they have commit bit), which is why i didn't end up opening my own nomination for them. However, i have seen @ethancedwards8 as a generally security-conscious contributor being responsive and active in various cleanup efforts, i do agree with the nomination.

[ethancedwards8]

Hi everyone. Thank you, Gaetan, for the nomination, and everyone else for both the support and the criticism. I am honored and thankful that people care enough about Nixpkgs to give both.

I'd be more than happy to address these concerns. On the topic of Conflicts of Interest, I currently work for Exa Labs where I work on Infrastructure, Developer Tooling, and Nix. Occasionally, I make PRs in Nixpkgs on behalf of my employer, usually to upstream things we're doing or to develop new tools that we'd like to have internally that we think would benefit others. When doing so, I clearly label that my contribution is done on behalf of my employer. Additionally, I am doing academic research as part of my coursework at Harvard SEAS where I use Nix to help with research environments.

As far myself being a frequent user of nixpkgs-review's approval feature, this is true! In fact, I wrote this feature around a year ago. That being said, I only use this feature when I've reviewed a PR and am waiting for a build success to approve. I never use this feature to approve PRs that I have not personally vetted and think are acceptable for merging. Even then, only around 260 of my total almost 2100 PRs reviewed have the string "Approved automatically following the successful run" posted by any user (not just me). While I can't figure out a way to search through this data natively in GitHub, I suspect the number of my own invocations is lower. Of these 260, around half of them are PRs opened by @r-ryantm.

I'd be more than happy to further address any concerns, and thank you again everyone. I (obviously) spend a lot of time on Nixpkgs, and I'm excited to spend even more ;)

[jfly]

I haven't interacted with @ethancedwards8 much in nixpkgs reviews, but we have chatted a good bit at nixos meetups in the SF bay area, and based in those interactions (a passion to do good work, and understand what he's doing, and empathy for the humans he's interacting with) I'd be happy to see him with the commit bit.

[wolfgangwalther]

Related: #68

[imincik]

+1 from me.

[SigmaSquadron]

I think more importantly than Ethan's current abilities is the growth he has demonstrated since his last nomination. This shows that he possesses the willingness to learn and improve further which in my experience has been the most frequently used skill during the onboarding process and the early months of exercising the commit bit. I would expect very good things from him, given the presented track record.

[eljamm]

I met Ethan during his Summer of Nix 2025 participation, where he did a fantastic job packaging NGI projects in Nixpkgs and NGIpkgs. He has kept contributing and reviewing since then (recent activity), and in every interaction I've found him to be constructive in his feedback and pleasant to work with.

I believe granting Ethan the commit bit would have a positive impact on the community and I trust him with this responsibility.

[yvnth]

I have personally not worked with Ethan before but I've always found Ethan's reviews really good and precise