NixOS (Nixpkgs actually) is indeed incredibly simple to contribute to.

It's a monorepo, and packages are declarative. So for most usecases, its just 5-10 LOC describing the source location, dependencies and build process.

After that, if it builds on your local copy of Nixpkgs, it will build on the same Nixpkgs commit as everything is purely functional. A simple PR is all you need.

For updates, there's super low burden too. Thanks to packages being declarative, everything is quite explicit. So a bot can check for source updates upstream, update your package and rebuild it. All it requires is simple maintainer approval.

Yeah the packaging part of NixOS/Nixpkgs is very pleasant. You write a "config" in the Nix language (example[1] of vorbis-tools, it's <40 LOC), open a PR on Github and it'll be submitted provided you follow the CR feedback. As a user you'd later download the built binary from the NixOS cache so you don't have to build it yourself.

[1]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/fce8f26af6ef8209c7d282...

Agreed, Gentoo and Nixpkgs both have really helpful people onboarding new packagers.