11–20 of 286 posts
Check into any one claim, and you’ll find it’s not the entire story.
This however is true:
> The Foundation board has unrepresentative composition relative to the community because, due to our count, all current members are cisgender, white-passing, men, one of whom has done military service, and one other (Eelco) likely relies on undisclosed military-tech work.
This seems more like a community crisis around Nix than a leadership crisis in the Nix community.
What does a community crisis mean exactly? If every member of the community wants one thing, and the leadership doesn't, then the community wins, every time.
The main reason for the persistence of Nix despite its warts and general mess is just "first-mover advantage": it was the first, therefore it has more libraries/packages/development of the ecosystem than the alternatives. Stop being lazy, go back to engineering first principles and it makes little sense to stay with Nix. Guix or any rewrite as a library in a well-developed language* makes more sense. *For example, wh…
https://blog.ezyang.com/2016/05/announcing-cabal-new-build-n...
https://cabal.readthedocs.io/en/2.0/nix-local-build-overview...
Also cabal isn't positioned to be a system level package manager. Haskell programmers are the type to want both their application builds and system dependencies to be reproducible and predictable.
> Stop being lazy, go back to engineering first principles and it makes little sense to stay with Nix. Guix or any rewrite as a library in a well-developed language* makes more sense.
Getting Guix packages to be as complete as nixpkgs isn't a matter of laziness though. One person wouldn't be able to do it no matter how disciplined they were.
[Determinate Systems] produces its own installer for Nix that the company promises will provide stable support for some Nix features. The letter states: "This is fine, however, it is questionably acceptable to do that while employing the lead developer of CppNix [the main Nix implementation] and saying nothing about how this will interact with the team's [decision-making] autonomy."
So "DetSys" is a commercial provider of Nix services, making corporate promises about future Nix feature support and (presumably) contracting with Anduril whose current focus is Shahed-inspired kamikaze drones, while wearing a separate hat as board chair of NixOS Foundation.
Effectively the tl;dr is whether Nix foundation should be bankrolled by the DoD, feature roadmap guided by the needs of mass produced suicide drones. And if they are, do other contributors want to continue providing free R&D for that organization?
The main reason for the persistence of Nix despite its warts and general mess is just "first-mover advantage": it was the first, therefore it has more libraries/packages/development of the ecosystem than the alternatives. Stop being lazy, go back to engineering first principles and it makes little sense to stay with Nix. Guix or any rewrite as a library in a well-developed language* makes more sense. *For example, wh…
I think it’s important to make clear that the letter is mostly bogus and almost libelous. Check into any one claim, and you’ll find it’s not the entire story. This however is true: > The Foundation board has unrepresentative composition relative to the community because, due to our count, all current members are cisgender, white-passing, men, one of whom has done military service, and one other (Eelco) likely relies…
That's not my reading of it.
However my biggest issue is the conflict of interest between Eelco -> DetSys -> Anduril Contract -> Eelco fighting hard for Nix to sponsor Anduril.
As foundation chair he should declare that he doesn't have a conflict of interest and DetSys doesn't have a contract with Anduril or have recused himself from the sponsorship discussion.