[Tracking] Packages too important to be orphaned

[AndersonTorres]

Issue description

As the issue says, there are too many packages in Nixpkgs that are being maintained by no one [*] and are too important, in the sense that nothing can be done without them.
Things like GNU Make, some networking libraries etc.

[*] "no one" here has two more or less equivalent meanings:

• "absolutely no one", an empty maintainers list; and
• no active maintainer - there are maintainers but all were retired

Related Links:

NixOS/rfcs#180
NixOS/rfcs#127

#290642

Steps to reproduce

1. Some magic command to seek for empty maintainers list:

$> grep -rP "maintainers\s*=\s*(with\s*(lib.)?maintainers;)?\s*\[\s*\]\s*;" $(pwd)

(thanks Sigmanificient)

$> nix-env \
--extra-experimental-features no-url-literals \
--option system x86_64-linux \
-f ./. -qaP \
--json \
--meta \
 --show-trace \
--no-allow-import-from-derivation | \
jq 'to_entries[] | select(.value.meta.maintainers == []) | .key' -r

(thanks pbsds)

2. Sort the results by seriousness
3. Redo 1 including silently-retired maintainers

Technical Details

Please cite this issue (#327779) when you bump such cases.

[Sigmanificient]

I suggest this command to retrieve all packages without maintainers

grep -rP "maintainers\s*=\s*(with\s*(lib.)?maintainers;)?\s*\[\s*\]\s*;" .

see the full list (2744)

[pbsds]

one not reliant on grep trickery:

nix-env --extra-experimental-features no-url-literals --option system x86_64-linux -f ./. -qaP --json --meta --show-trace --no-allow-import-from-derivation | jq 'to_entries[] | select(.value.meta.maintainers == []) | .key' -r

https://gist.github.com/pbsds/bd6c82bd91e01d4dbc656d54a500649a

[Sigmanificient]

one not reliant on grep trickery:

nix-env --extra-experimental-features no-url-literals --option system x86_64-linux -f ./. -qaP --json --meta --show-trace --no-allow-import-from-derivation | jq 'to_entries[] | select(.value.meta.maintainers == []) | .key' -r

https://gist.github.com/pbsds/bd6c82bd91e01d4dbc656d54a500649a

Oh wow it captures twice as much packages, I wonder where they come from

[chewblacka]

Oh wow it captures twice as much packages, I wonder where they come from

About 1250 are duplicates, namely:

python311Packages.XYZ and python312Packages.XYZ

[Sigmanificient]

Ah I see 😅

[AndersonTorres]

Duplicates and autogen packages like MELPA...