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The majority of these commits are to keep packages up to date. Easy to get an incredibly high number of commits when nixpkgs is a monorepo containing the definition of 140000 packages

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Good to know. I am entirely against monorepos but in the very specific case of NixOS I get how it can actually make sense.

Anecdote: I was trying out a new editor at some point that had just had a huge update. I installed it on NixOS and noticed the new update had not been pushed onto NixPkgs. I went through their contribution guide and found how to update the package. I opened a PR and immediately a couple previous contributors & a specific maintainer were on the PR and left me some helpful comments and questions and I got it merged a few days later.

And I was someone who hadn’t been active in NixPkgs at all. The community reviewing these small package updates are active and really care which is how the number of commits can explode

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