John has been part of every meeting since the beginning.
He took on a lot of work on behalf of the team, and provided useful suggestions in discussions, advocating for stability, reasonable design decisions, and maintainable code.
He was in general highly productive within the team process, and repeatedly helped us to keep focus on our stated goals.
Specifically, early on he suggested to gather more experience with the team reviews in order derive our values for the project encode a more structured approach to guiding contributions, which is slowly bearing fruit these days.
John is already the contributor with the most code changes to date (only topped by principal author Eelco), and is well-known to be highly knowledgeable about both high-level design and low-level internals of the code base.
He has continued to offer high quality work during the team's operation, which resulted in many pull requests getting merged that further the team's goals.
It is due time for John to be come an official team member and be granted merge access that he will surely exercise with the great care he is known for.
This way the links are clearly within the manual (ie not absolute paths),
while allowing snippets to reference the documentation root reliably,
regardless of at which base url they're included.
mdbook-linkcheck is not consistent about its warning setting.
It disables some warnings, but not the warnings about lack of
fragment checking support; hence the extra filtering.
Prior to this change, we had a bunch of ad-hoc string manipulation code
scattered around. This made it hard to figure out what data model for
string contexts is.
Now, we still store string contexts most of the time as encoded strings
--- I was wary of the performance implications of changing that --- but
whenever we parse them we do so only through the
`NixStringContextElem::parse` method, which handles all cases. This
creates a data type that is very similar to `DerivedPath` but:
- Represents the funky `=<drvpath>` case as properly distinct from the
others.
- Only encodes a single output, no wildcards and no set, for the
"built" case.
(I would like to deprecate `=<path>`, after which we are in spitting
distance of `DerivedPath` and could maybe get away with fewer types, but
that is another topic for another day.)
Robert Hensing
Linus Heckemann