91–100 of 217 posts
As a layman who has only used AI to package a couple things on NixOS for personal use, I would think that LLM agents are perfect for taking over most of the nixpkgs workflow.
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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…
Meanwhile I’m over here with my 100 line flake.nix that installs system dependencies with direnv across hundreds of dev users and dozens of repositories wondering why everyone is all up in arms about boring and stable technology that solves a specific problem
For that work project though, the final closure was thousands of store paths, with hundreds of source repos being brought together across a multiple of languages and build systems. A lot of that was/is essential complexity, just the reality that robotics is hard, the tools aren't as mature as in other domains, and so you have to be able to develop features and bugfixes all over a huge software stack simultaneously. Doing that with conventional tooling basically gets you a rigid world where you have to tag/release intermediate packages all the time just to get changes into testing, or you have to build the world on every push (lol docker).
With input addressing and hermetic building of the intermediate stages, Nix and Bazel are systems that don't make you make that choice.
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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)
Technical people (or people with bad social skills) also love to inadequately and incorrectly try and turn the complexity of social organization into simple laws and rules. This kind of reduction doesn't really do people a service, and is also a bit arrogant and simple-minded. It would be much more interesting to name this as a tendency, and try to describe when and how it might occur, how the structure of the org mi…
The Nix drama from the start has been profoundly untethered from actual development or improvement of the project rather than minutia of committee organization and moderation of the Discourse forum
Whatever you think about the $5000 Anduril sponsorship for example, the "discussion" around that took up a ridiculous amount of mindshare relative to the actual dev work compared to almost any other open source project like Linux kernel for example
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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.
I will tell on myself here but having an anime pfp evokes something childish for me and I do judge the user based on it. I expect to be judged similarly because I use the album art for a favorite album of mine as a pfp on the same platform and would consider it equally inappropriate if I were to share a heartfelt and serious message like this one.
After being a heavy user of NixOS, I quit using it due to the communities instability, I don't trust it.
The PRs keep rolling and things keep improving!
If someone wants to be a part of the community, I can see why this might dissuade people though.
Nix package manager: correctly resolves dependency hell for your entire OS. Nix governance: still hasn't resolved dependency hell for humans apparently.
For a certain definition of "correctly" (namely: it doesn't, it just does what containers do and ships unique versions for every package).
If you like writing bash scripts then go for it. (Personally I'd rather be doing literally anything else, like, I don't know, shoveling manure.)
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…
After being a heavy user of NixOS, I quit using it due to the communities instability, I don't trust it.
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…
Even just reading this has more bureaucracy than at a company with hundreds of people. Holy hell some projects turned open source into committees and committees to decide what committees are needed.