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The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded

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Re: The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded

#191

Post by dlahoda »

klodolph wrote: post #72
haswell wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you share more about what made you move away? I’ve been running a NixOS based homelab for awhile now with 5 physical hosts and about 30 NixOS containers/VMs in an Incus cluster and I can’t imagine moving away from my central Nix repo and ability to rebuild/upgrade the entire fleet in one command and feel confident that things will work. While I’m concerned about the disbanding, it would take quite a lot to make m…

YMMV, I don’t run a home lab, I just have a NAS and run a personal website. I definitely don’t have a “fleet”. I have two servers running Debian and I can bring them back up from zero in “Rebuild everything in one command and have it work” is not something that I’m chasing after and I am skeptical that it would work anyway. Maybe there is something I’m missing, but when I update the software, the updates come with ch…

Yeah. I fixed AI/GPU stack consisting of 6 existing packages to run CLI on Mac. Fixed all comments during several weeks. And then silence. No approve no nothing for few months. Closed PR and will never come back.

Re: The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded

#192

Post by vehemenz »

nylonstrung wrote: post #87
talentedcoin wrote: post #7

Why is the Nix community such a dumpster fire?

The most obvious cause was forcing BDFL and creator Eelco to step down https://lwn.net/Articles/970824/ The moderation team posted an open letter demanding he step down, among other reasons this accused him of jeopardizing the safety of people from "marginalized backgrounds" and allowing "fascists" in the community I have tried very hard to find any examples of what this is a actually referring to and genuinely have…

Whatever the legitimate issues were, the letter undermines its own credibility with its overbearing and self-righteous tone. Aside from Determinate Systems and the Anduril bit, the complaints lack specificity. The Blueskyisms thrown around here are just as indicative of "cultural problems" as anything else, assuming these views are representative of the community.

Re: The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded

#193

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

talentedcoin wrote: post #7

Why is the Nix community such a dumpster fire?

Technology creates cliques. Some of them formed for good reasons, others maybe not.

The nature of nix prevents the nix community from being a group of like minded people because it tries to be a unifying layer over technology which is not made by like minded people. To do what nix does, you need to overcome whatever forces caused those cliques to form in the first place. You need representatives from each group. It's a bit like congress, which has similar problems.

And its not just disparate language communities. It's people who want to build influential businesses, and its people who want to insulate themselves against the influence of tech business. Its people who think it's OK to build killer robots, and it's people who don't want to be killed by those robots.

Getting people work together is hard. Nixpkgs tries to do that to such a degree that you can put a version number the result. Maybe it's admirable, maybe it's folly. I think it's both.

I'm not going to blame the people who are ambitious enough to try because as far as I'm aware, whatever other successful communities exist, they're succeeding at a less audacious goal.

Re: The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded

#194

Post by klodolph »

haswell wrote: post #85
klodolph wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YMMV, I don’t run a home lab, I just have a NAS and run a personal website. I definitely don’t have a “fleet”. I have two servers running Debian and I can bring them back up from zero in “Rebuild everything in one command and have it work” is not something that I’m chasing after and I am skeptical that it would work anyway. Maybe there is something I’m missing, but when I update the software, the updates come with ch…

> “Rebuild everything in one command and have it work” is not something that I’m chasing after and I am skeptical that it would work anyway. I'm not using "rebuild" to describe recreating an instance from scratch, but in the "nixos-rebuild" sense, i.e. I can deploy a fleet-wide configuration shared by all hosts, or apply package updates across the fleet, etc. As for the skepticism, all I can offer is my experience wh…

> As for the skepticism, all I can offer is my experience which is that it does indeed work, and I've been running this way for awhile.

I believe you. Do you believe me?

> At that point, NixOS just clicked and I'm far more productive with 30+ hosts than I used to be with 1-2.

There’s not much room for improvement in my own productivity here. The amount of time I spend maintaining these hosts is not large to begin with.

> This sounds like you're branching into territory that can no longer be reasonably framed as NixOS vs. Debian (or other distro of choice).

I was never talking about NixOS in the first place!

Re: The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded

#195

Post by mikepurvis »

JamesSwift wrote: post #175
mikepurvis wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way I set it up at my shop was that everything would build on your PR, and so by the time it merged, everything was already cached and no one should see a rebuild... at most a download.

Im thinking through this for my team, any previous writeups on it? Or do you mind brain dumping the high level of how you had it setup from a design perspective : D

This was a talk geared specifically at a ROS audience so it's lighter from a general infra point of view but there may still be something useful:

https://vimeo.com/767139940

At the time of that talk we threw up a lightly sanitized version of the tooling on github. The basic idea was that there were these two repos:

https://github.com/clearpathrobotics/nix-ros-base

https://github.com/clearpathrobotics/nix-ros

The first was the "toolkit" repo that had all the manual maintained dependencies and functions, while the second was a managed repo which would have tags pushed to it by the pipeline.

So basically all the repos had a push hook attached to them that would run this centralized dispatch workflow (on Jenkins, but it could be anything). The dispatch job would sanitize the branch name like joey-b/fancy-feature and attach it to the most recent "released version" + devel timestamp, so you'd end up with like 2.25+20260808-12345+joey-b-fancy-feature, and that would be pushed as a floating tag to the nix-ros repo with all the sources from the hundreds of participating repos either locked to the versions set in the top level 2.25 devel branches or to the specified feature branch, so that a given build could pull together multiple same-named branches from across repos. That would be sent off to Hydra, and nix2container outputs were also built that went to simulator based validation.

But the end UI was pretty nice, basically a nix configuration mapped the names to the those repos so after the build was done you could just pull it and "enter the workspace" environment like:

    nix build ros/2.25+2026080-12345+joey-b-fancy-feature#setup
    source output/setup.sh
And if you were hacking on the "base" repo itself, it was very easy to pass flags like --override-input base=ros-base#some-ref or path/to/local for quick iteration.

Anyway, as I say, I'm obviously proud of what was achieved, particularly in a pre-LLM world, and the experience of building this has given me many of pg's blub experiences over the years, where I look at the ways that other build and packaging systems solve these problems and think yes, yes I can see how that works, but also, I have experienced a world where in exchange for some relatively minor strictness tradeoffs, the set of problems that that is solving never had to exist in the first place.

Re: The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded

#196

Post by mikepurvis »

shakow wrote: post #184
mikepurvis wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was lead on a Nix adoption effort for a few years that was kind of like that: it solved real problems, unlocked far faster, smaller, and cheaper builds than would have been possible any other way, and let us ship delta updates over crappy wifi connections to Linux computers on robots. Flakes were a perfect fit for our model, and we were just in time for stuff like up to date versions of cuda and tensorflow to be de…

> let us ship delta updates over crappy wifi connections to Linux computers on robots How were you doing that? Running your own channels, or something more complex? Also, did you use a push or a pull model w.r.t. the robots?

At the time I was there we hadn't made it all the way to NixOS on the targets, so it was an Ubuntu "base" + Nix managing the app workspace as a kind of pseudo container, though able to bring more of its own system configuration with it (https://github.com/numtide/system-manager) than the more typical nuisance setup of container + separate outer config managed by ansible or a deb or whatever.

As a result of that, in "production" we still actually delivered full rootfs images just to be absolutely certain, and the delta upgrades were for smaller test fleets that could updated hourly just via simple push tooling.

If I was building it from scratch though, I'd probably just do NixOS + colmena, and do a push model forever. It's not worth the saved SSH connection to not have those logs and status messages coming back to the central coordinator immediately.

Re: The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded

#197

Post by lelanthran »

shakna wrote: post #68
frantathefranta wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Why do you consider it so strongly to be inappropriate? It literally does not tell me anything about the user. DOS was built in a basement. Pretty sure suit and tie wasn't the dejour whilst they were doing it. Linux was a hobby project. Pretty sure that slacks featured more than a blazer.

> Pretty sure suit and tie wasn't the dejour whilst they were doing it.

It's totally wild that you think the only alternative to anime furries are suits and ties.

Just what kind of fucked up environment did your workplace have with such a policy?

:-)

Re: The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded

#198

Post by jonringer117 »

farfatched wrote: post #181
jonringer117 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're unemployed enough, I have a long winded video on the 2022-2024 drama. From the perspective of the guy who was labeled a nazi and banned. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gp0FI8Gw1iA

This was such a sad period, and I'm still sad at how you were treated. I hope in cooler times that the lifetime ban is lifted.

That would require assumption of good faith from all participants.

This resignation post reinforces the view that there is little good faith assumptions amongst the broader Nix ecosystem.

Re: The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded

#199

Post by shakna »

frantathefranta wrote: post #188
shakna wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like you associate anime with childhood cartoons? But considering how much of that industry output is 16+ or 18+ (usually violence and themes), I'd say that is more of a cultural confabulation. I would absolutely not expect a business profile image, regardless of the message. Nor do I get why you think it is so essential. Half the red team industry are furries. Would you criticise them for not using a mug…

Yes, I do believe not having a pfp at all would be better (for disclosing CVEs or sharing a statement about disbanding the nixpkgs team). By all means use any pfp for normal forum purposes.

I'm afraid at this point, that sounds more like a you problem. You're judging people for something inconsequential. Your reasons are your own but... Probably worth some introspection here.

Re: The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded

#200

Post by black_knight »

shevy-java wrote: post #139
tomberek wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Nixpkgs Core team was established in Sept 2025 ( https://discourse.nixos.org/t/establishing-the-nixpkgs-core-... ), so it is a fairly new concept and idea. They've accomplished some good things as highlighted in the post, but are now stepping down. Yes, we'd prefer for the team to exist, but we've also functioned without one for ~20 years. It may take multiple iterations to bootstrap the concept and to figure out…

Packages were handled way before 2025 already, so it is strange that you insinuate they'd all only burn out within a year, and before that it was all cake and tea. NixOS is dying, everyone sees this right now. > but we've also functioned without one for ~20 years. Then this is also a PR problem because why need a team when the 20 years before were allegedly so perfect?

I know nothing about the organisation of NixOS, but I know that NixOS is in a unique position now that LLMs have arrived. It offers the unique experience where you can fearlessly let the LLM loose on your system config to setup any convenience you want. I am not alone to have made this observation, so I am hopeful that Nix and NixOS will gain even more momentum in the future!
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