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The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded

discourse.nixos.org

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Re: The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded

#71

Post by toshinoriyagi »

alberth wrote: post #33

Can someone explain the ramifications of this to those of us not informed. I’m in the process of about to deploy Nixos to server workloads, but am now hesitant because I don’t understand these ramifications.

This was a governance structure that began ~1 year ago. Nix is 23 years old, so it won't be dying or going away due to this. But it is sad to see two extremely valuable contributors leave the project due to burn out.

Nix and NixOS are two of the most revolutionary pieces of software in my experience. Hopefully Nix finds a governance structure worth of it.

Re: The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded

#72

Post by klodolph »

haswell wrote: post #54
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…

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 changes and it’s possible that things break. My goals are to keep reasonably up to date and to be able to fix things quickly if they do break.

Regarding Nix complaints:

Package maintenance is kind of a crapshoot. Maybe your package is in nixpkgs, maybe there is a flake for it, maybe you find something that is actively updated, maybe not. Maybe there is a package but half the features are turned off because the maintainer didn’t bother. Maybe there is a package but half the features are turned off on macOS for unknown reasons. What I want is just to know what level of distro-level maintenance the package has, including its transitive dependencies.

Docs are just kinda bad. Fragmented across different sites. Docs teaching you Nix forwards or backwards, or teaching old Nix, or teaching Nix with flakes, or teaching you Nix for end-users or developers or package maintainers, or Nix on Mac or NixOS. A surprising number of broken links. What I want is one site, with a little drop-down menu to select the version I am using. What I have is hours spent on the NixOS Discord trying to figure out how to do basic stuff.

Re: The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded

#73

Post by alberth »

lrvick wrote: post #50

Anyone looking for a full source bootstrapped, multi-party-signed, container native, and deterministic alternative to nix, check out https://stagex.tools https://codeberg.org/stagex/stagex

Isn’t this an apples/oranges comparison.

Nix/NixOS is fundamentally about a declarative system configuration.

And as far as I understand, StageX doesn’t have that.

Re: The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded

#74

Post by talentedcoin »

aroman wrote: post #47
talentedcoin wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Very true.

I like the friction aspect to some extent because I think keeping the base system pure confers many benefits. But you’re right. Bazzite imposes a certain workflow. For installing new software …

1) try ujust first (since there is some porcelain provided for some things that can be challenging to install properly on immutable distros, such as Steam or DaVinci Resolve)

2) if that doesn’t work, try flatpaks from Bazaar/Flathub

3) if that doesn’t work, use Homebrew which installs into your home dir by default

4) use rpm-ostree as a last resort.

Functionally I find this has driven me towards a very devcontainer-centric setup. Of course in theory Nix can do better, but in practice I’ve found the combo Bazzite offers, not to mention the excellent hardware support, hits the sweet spot for me.

Re: The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded

#75

Post by talentedcoin »

jolux wrote: post #65
jitl wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The creator of Nix soft-forked it and started a company, that sort of inevitably leads to bad vibes I think

Can’t say I blame him, given the tone of some of the convos on the discourse site.

Re: The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded

#76

Post by lrvick »

alberth wrote: post #73
lrvick wrote: post #50

Anyone looking for a full source bootstrapped, multi-party-signed, container native, and deterministic alternative to nix, check out https://stagex.tools https://codeberg.org/stagex/stagex

Isn’t this an apples/oranges comparison. Nix/NixOS is fundamentally about a declarative system configuration. And as far as I understand, StageX doesn’t have that.

You can define an immutable, deterministic, and bootable system image for anything from an enclave to a laptop with just the primitives provided by the OCI Containerfile standard.

A stagex containerfile can define a system build recipe in such a way that several competing build systems that obey the same standard can all get the same hashes, which we sign every release.

Re: The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded

#77

Post by klodolph »

haswell wrote: post #58
klodolph wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn’t use the word “complicated”, maybe I’m missing something, but I listed some specific complaints and “Nix is complicated” wasn’t on the list.

Not OP, I’m not really sure what your specific complaints are based on the original comment. They seemed more like general/nonspecific concerns, which left the comment pretty open to interpretation.

I’m here in the thread and I can answer questions or elaborate on things, so if you want to know what I meant you can just ask me and there’s a good chance I’ll respond.

Re: The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded

#78

Post by klodolph »

noosphr wrote: post #53
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…

Is your company paying anyone to develop nix?

Yes

Re: The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded

#79

Post by skydhash »

aroman wrote: post #47
talentedcoin wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My issue with Silverblue is that the unix exosystem was meant to be deeply collaborative ecosystem for programs. Meaning each program doing one thing and communicating with each other through various IPC mechanisms. Atomic systems with containers broke that.

Like I’ve created a rough media player with curl, jq, mpv powered by my subsonic server. The same issues happens with my emacs config which depends on various utilities. Yes I could create a main toolbox for all of that, but the whole thing was a bit cumbersome.

When I do want proper isolation, I create a VM.

Re: The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded

#80

Post by zem »

throwaway260806 wrote: post #55
ronef wrote: post #48

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 thi…

> more than anyone can imagine two people doing The core team was just 2 people and they disbanded? There was also a steerco for just 2 people? I’m now even more confused.

there are two distinct usesn of team/committee/council/etc in the software world, though they often get conflated. one is a formal structure to help with things like coordination and governance when many people are working on something, and it does seem a little silly to have one consist of just two people.

but the other usage is to create an entity, and say "this entity is responsible for so and so problem", and humans then sign up to be part of the entity as a formal indication that they are working on this problem. and in this sense of the word it's perfectly fine for a core team to be two people, and for it to officially disband when those people no longer want to be working on the problem for whatever reason. note that they did try to recruit new people to the effort, and if they had succeeded then the "core team" entity would have provided some sort of continuity to the project despite the original people moving on.

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