Nixpkgs provides a large number of packages that can be used in various ways. In some cases you want to make modifications to a package.

In this post we'll go through various ways how modified packages can be used in the Nix ecosystem, how packages can be modified and finally show some common use-cases:

• Use a different version of a package
• Use local source code for package
• Use a different dependency for a single package
• Apply a security patch system-wide

Keeping commit history in pull requests clean can be hard. git-rebase offers some methodologies to alter history, but often this results in a clunky workflow.

Autosquash is a feature of git-rebase that I have recently grown fond of. It can be used to more easily alter commits in history. In this post I'll give some insight how autosquash can be used in practice.

Working on large pull requests can be hard. It often is even harder to review them. A clean commit history can help reviewers out. Naming the commits consistently can help in that regard. Often it is hard to do this consistently beforehand, so sometimes it would be nice to rename commits after already committing them.

In this post I'll explain 3 methods of renaming commits:

• Rename the last commit using git commit --amend
• Rename commits one-by-one using git rebase and reword
• Rename commits in batch using git rebase and amend