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The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded

discourse.nixos.org

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Re: The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded

#131

Post by majorchord »

Aurornis wrote: post #125
aliasxneo wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct, but it's another domino in a broader trend that appears to have a common root. It was only a year ago that the moderation team mass resigned pointing the finger at the steering committee [1]. It's not been the same people for the last two years, but clearly there must be systemic issues in the people getting elected to this board for there to be so many persistent problems. Also see roberth's resignation [2]…

I don't know if the moderation team's collapse is indicative of anything. The first blog post complains about the Steering Committee for doing, well, steering . The moderators complaining that the Steering Committee is "interfering" points to a bigger issue where the moderation team didn't understand their role. The second blog post is from someone on the steering committee who complains about Gabriella439 (the autho…

I think the elephant in the room is that many tech nerds are just famously terrible at working with others and social skills in general, even if they have a long history of excellent work. Especially so if that experience was not gained from traditional careers where it wasn't possible to get by without people skills.

Re: The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded

#132

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

lrvick wrote: post #76
alberth wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What is the stagex story for managing a "normal" laptop? Is there a tool that converts an OCI image to a ... rootfs partition? Or such?

Re: The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded

#133

Post by indy »

aliasxneo wrote: post #18

I really don't think these issues are necessarily "systemic" in the sense that they've been ongoing for the last decade. I _was_ a long-time contributor until about two years ago when certain actors came into the community and started making a bunch of unnecessary drama. Since then I've seen some long-time friends in the community either slowly drop out or simply get ran out by a mob with pitch forks.

Many such cases across all aspects of society.

Re: The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded

#134

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

alberth wrote: post #127
lrvick wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just to confirm my understanding, is the following corrects? NixOS: “Given this configuration, build me the same system again.” StageX: “Prove that every binary in this system came from the source code I think it did.” Because aren’t these two very different things.

Different angles, same problem. Nix should deterministically take the same pinned inputs and produce the same output, which is also a solution to "Prove that every binary in this system came from the source code I think it did." (since that source code is one of the inputs that's pinned)

Re: The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded

#135

Post by spoaceman7777 »

aliasxneo wrote: post #111
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…

Correct, but it's another domino in a broader trend that appears to have a common root. It was only a year ago that the moderation team mass resigned pointing the finger at the steering committee [1]. It's not been the same people for the last two years, but clearly there must be systemic issues in the people getting elected to this board for there to be so many persistent problems. Also see roberth's resignation [2]…

The moderation team stuff was largely unrelated to tech stuff, and was specifically involved with politics and ideological HR-style cancellation discourse.

One of the most notable actions of the team was managing a protest against defense companies assisting the project.

Its disbanding was just another instance of the well documented, and statistically supported, end of the cancellation committee trend that rapidly took off in 2021, peaked in 2023, and has nearly fully receded into oblivion since then.

The backlash against that trend, while not communicated publicly by most (far-right folks excluded...), has been massive, but handled tactfully, behind the scenes. Always important to remember that the equity-left is only about 20% of Americans, and the US is the global stronghold for such ideals. (That 20% makes quite a bit of noise, which gives many the impression that there are many more than there actually are. The reality is just that most people are polite, and don't want to get involved in discourse where their opinions could lead to them facing dramatic negative consequences.)

The global community has not been supportive of the continuing of the trend. So it's not just pushback from the (largely polite) majority of those in the English-speaking world that gave the whole situation a fair shake.

Anyway, to reiterate: the moderation team's disbanding had just about nothing to do with technical aspects of the project, and it could be argued that its disbanding was potentially a positive sign for stability.

Re: The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded

#136

Post by roenxi »

aliasxneo wrote: post #111
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…

Correct, but it's another domino in a broader trend that appears to have a common root. It was only a year ago that the moderation team mass resigned pointing the finger at the steering committee [1]. It's not been the same people for the last two years, but clearly there must be systemic issues in the people getting elected to this board for there to be so many persistent problems. Also see roberth's resignation [2]…

> but clearly there must be systemic issues in the people getting elected to this board for there to be so many persistent problems.

First time dealing with a committee? It is routine for every community to be shrouded in an ongoing cloud of drama and that doesn't indicate anything at all. There certainly could be problems and if there are it'll generate chatter, but the problems have to be dealt with individually. People resigning and complaining about a steering committee is normal.

Re: The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded

#137

Post by shevy-java »

Let's not sugarcoat it too much: NixOS is dying.

Also, we see censorship running supreme again:

"This post was flagged by the community and is temporarily hidden"

People need to stop censoring everything, seriously.

NixOS going downwards also coincides with the rise of AI. AI slop really puts stress onto so many projects now.

Re: The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded

#138

Post by shevy-java »

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…

> the Nixpkgs core team disbanding does not mean Nixpkgs or Nix is dying.

Nice attempt to try to rescue here, but everyone sees that NixOS is dying.

When a group of, say, ten people give up in a moment, that does not bode well for the future of NixOS.

Re: The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded

#139

Post by shevy-java »

tomberek wrote: post #60
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…

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?

Re: The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded

#140

Post by rossng »

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…

We're using it in the same way - running NixOS on robots.

Overall I think it is succeeding, though it definitely doesn't 'just work' out of the box. We've invested a fair bit of effort into things like:

- containerised services[1]

- UI for branch deployment/service management

- delta patching (at the byte level, to save bandwidth)

The main problem was always that nixlang/nixpkgs are arcane and have a steep learning curve. The majority of your colleagues (in any workplace) don't care about build systems and just want things to work. I think that has been more or less solved by LLMs, and it's now more viable than ever to adopt Nix.

[1] https://bou.ke/blog/nixos-containers/

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