Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nix and NixOS probably wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the anime pfps :)
I do not like anime but holy crap do people with anime pfps make excellent software engineers and terrifying red teamers.
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The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded
101–110 of 220 posts
Re: The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded
#102Ah, yearly I hate/love nix post..
I tell you what. Ever since I migrated my dev workflow to nix package manager (and home manager for system depa), my life became simpler like 10 times
I can configure any macos machine in like 20 mins (I use Determinate)
Re: The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded
#103Earlier 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.
There was an architecture team which existed, I would assume the usage of "core" was to disambiguate.
Re: The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded
#104I 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.
It is a systemic issue, though, when the system enables these certain actors to remain in position and cause the community to break apart like it’s doing.
Re: The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded
#105“Our experience is that the Steering Committee as an institution lacks a native instinct for the delegation envisioned by the constitution, while also not being sufficiently engaged and cohesive to handle individual decisions at those levels itself.” This is an almost poetic description of micromanagement. I really like Nix and have been running it as my main OS for several years in the past ~ 10 years. I don’t think…
The governance of the project went into political extremes instead of focusing on technology. That made it impossible for anyone other than political extremists to continue in governance positions. Obviously these people had too much on their plate and couldn't find anyone who would join to help them, as they chased everyone away. Burn out was inevitable.
Re: The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded
#106Nix 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).
This is not what nix does unless a user configures it poorly. Nix will ship a single, dynamically linked package/version combo for all package that depends on it. Containers ship one for each package that depends on it.
Re: The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded
#107For 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.
It was 4 people originally a year ago. One left because too much drama. Another joined another committee and was ineligible to continue. The remaining two wanted to recruit new people, but no one wanted anywhere near that dumpster fire. So they got burnt out and disbanded the whole thing.
Re: The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded
#108There 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…
> Meanwhile, my company is using Nix for everything heavily internally. Everyone gets their dependencies via Nix unless you are like using PAM or something. Why doesn't your company fund development of nix and its associated ecosystem?
Why ask this? Maybe they are? Maybe they aren't, and that's ok too.
Re: The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/pluggable-authentication-modu...
What does this have to do with installing packages?
It has to do with installing packages that use PAM to e.g. validate user passwords (e.g. display managers, screen lockers). So there is a system PAM with its configuration, but making a program packaged with nix respect that system PAM config is not as easy as just linking with libpam from nixpkgs.
Re: The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded
#110I’m not saying it’s decisively correlated, or anything on its own, but there sure are a lot of anime avatars in this community.
When I did nix, I joked that everyone I met in the community was either a queer furry kayaker or a military-industrial Terminator dev, with no in-between.