The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded • Hacker News Board

Re: The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded

#161

Post by imadierich » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 9:46 AM UTC

forrestthewoods wrote: post #123

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…

My gut feeling is that Nix is just not quite the right abstraction level. I can’t quite articulate this. And hell maybe I’m wrong. I don’t want to configure a global environment. I just want a build system that works reliably in any environment and can cross-compile from any platform to any platform. Nix does too damn much. All I want is a build system that doesn’t suck. And I want to run it on windows + Mac + Linux…

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Re: The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded

#162

Post by gcarvalho » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 9:47 AM UTC

dindresto wrote: post #147

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…

"we've also functioned without one for ~20 years" I'm sorry to say that this is a highly ignorant reaction to the situation. Nixpkgs was nowhere the size it is now in terms of contributors and packages, the growth in the past six years was enormous.

I don't mean to be dismissive of the work done by the team which just resigned, and hope they get back on their feet.

But also out of those 6y the core team did not exist for ~5y, apparently. How is it a highly ignorant reaction?

Re: The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded

#163

Post by nextaccountic » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 9:53 AM UTC

xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #82

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…

I agree with the concept but the name is terrible. "Core team" gives one the impression that this is the most important team to the project. It's not! It could be called the "governance facilitator" team or admins or something. Please name the next iteration something less spicy.

exactly what rust devs realized. they went from "core team" to "leadership council" in the next iteratiion

Re: The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded

#164

Post by nextaccountic » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 9:56 AM UTC

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…

Flakes must drop the "experimental" moniker and be officially supported by Nix. It may not be perfect, but it has been widely adopted.

Re: The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded

#165

Post by lwfitzgerald » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 9:57 AM UTC

sshine wrote: post #120

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…

I moved my homelab to Kubernetes. I just don’t see the use of single VPS’es. But I use the cluster as a training platform, so if I didn’t need Kubernetes in other parts of my life, I probably would have stuck with my NixOS VPS’es that all share config. I use kubenix to manage the cluster, of course. ;-)

A

Re: The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded

#166

Post by fcantournet » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 10:01 AM UTC

spoaceman7777 wrote: post #135

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]…

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 t…

> Always important to remember that the equity-left is only about 20% of Americans, and the US is the global stronghold for such ideals

What ? The U.S main ideological exports of the last 50 years are neoliberalism, alt-right and techno-feudalism. Its 2 party would register as far right and center right in basically any other country.

Re: The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded

#167

Post by nextaccountic » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 10:04 AM UTC

lrvick wrote: post #144

alberth wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Both statements are valid for StageX

How to define the list of installed packages in a config file in StageX, and tell the system that it should be the new list of packages? Like done in nixos

If I remove a package from the list itt best uninstalled, if I add it gets installed, etc

Re: The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded

#168

Post by dindresto » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 10:11 AM UTC

gcarvalho wrote: post #162

dindresto wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"we've also functioned without one for ~20 years" I'm sorry to say that this is a highly ignorant reaction to the situation. Nixpkgs was nowhere the size it is now in terms of contributors and packages, the growth in the past six years was enormous.

I don't mean to be dismissive of the work done by the team which just resigned, and hope they get back on their feet. But also out of those 6y the core team did not exist for ~5y, apparently. How is it a highly ignorant reaction?

The amount of monthly contributions has doubled in the last four years alone, from ~7k to ~14k commits per month. Why did I take six years as a reference? Because 2020 is the year nixpkgs really started to pick up traction, and the growth has been almost linear ever since.

Your argument only holds if I were to say "it grew to its current amount of monthly contributions in 2020 and then stayed constant, without growing any further."

Re: The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded

#169

Post by tonnikiki » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 10:54 AM UTC

tomhow wrote: post #126

periodjet wrote: post #8

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Re: The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded

#170

Post by bityard » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 10:59 AM UTC

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?

> NixOS is dying

I won't believe that until Netcraft confirms it.