Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded

discourse.nixos.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 221 posts

Re: The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded

#41

Post by spott »

tkel wrote: post #30
talentedcoin wrote: post #7

Why is the Nix community such a dumpster fire?

If you've been part of an organization or a community that has undergone a big conflict or a schism, you'd understand. Plus this community largely communicates exclusively over text, which doesn't really work well for community repair. It's difficult to get people to feel OK with each other, or spend time together not arguing, when they only ever write intense letters to each other. Plus social work with technical pe…

https://jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html

Any organization is eventually controlled by people more interested in the organization than its mission. Or something to that effect.

(Accidentally attached this to the wrong post, meant for the post above this)

Re: The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded

#42

Post by jitl »

tkel wrote: post #30
talentedcoin wrote: post #7

Why is the Nix community such a dumpster fire?

If you've been part of an organization or a community that has undergone a big conflict or a schism, you'd understand. Plus this community largely communicates exclusively over text, which doesn't really work well for community repair. It's difficult to get people to feel OK with each other, or spend time together not arguing, when they only ever write intense letters to each other. Plus social work with technical pe…

what was the Nix schism? Did something like systemd happen? or like, Determinate/commercial vs Not? Or more like USA culture wars / code-of-conduct flamers (i vaguely recall some drama around a conference sponsor)?

anyways, i hope there’s a path to some kind of redemption and reconciliation in the future for the community. it sounds like it’s been Bad for years at this point.

Re: The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded

#45

Post by frantathefranta »

soupbowl wrote: post #25

After being a heavy user of NixOS, I quit using it due to the communities instability, I don't trust it.

In my mind Nix is too strong of an idea and once this community finally self-immolates, someone else is going to pick it up (maybe Determinate) and it'll continue on.

Re: The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded

#47

Post by aroman »

talentedcoin wrote: post #46
aroman wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What alternative have you moved on to?

I suggest giving Bazzite a try

I tried Fedora Silverblue and I found its notion/implementation of immutability fairly frustrating. It’s actually the reason I went to nixOS.

It seemed to me that it was all the friction of immutability without any of the benefits of reproducibility.

Re: The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded

#48

Post by ronef »

For anyone reading this and jumping to a broader conclusion: the Nixpkgs core team disbanding does not mean Nixpkgs or Nix is dying. It does mean that this particular structure was not sustainable, very important contributors burnt out and we need to do better, faster. We need to continue learning from this and continue building a stronger ecosystem that prioritizes the contributors who are the only reason any of this is possible.

Personally, I'm sorry and grateful. Sorry that it ended in core folks being burnt out. Grateful since they did some of the most amazing work, more than anyone can imagine two people doing.

Re: The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded

#49

Post by [deleted] »

mikepurvis wrote: post #31
klodolph wrote: post #20

There was a sweet spot in like 2024 when it seemed like everything was possible with Nix, but now it seems like everything “experimental” is permanently so (like flakes), packages I care about are not as fresh as I want, I have no mental recall for Nix commands… Meanwhile, my company is using Nix for everything heavily internally. Everyone gets their dependencies via Nix unless you are like using PAM or something. Re…

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…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN