lol i can’t wait to hear the lunduke show about this one
The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded
121–130 of 220 posts
Re: The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded
#122All the posts about nix always go something like: 1. the "I used nix once/some time ago but I realized it's stupid/hard/whatever" 2. anime pfps/furries/trans/woke are bad 3. complaining about CoC/governance/etc Irrespective of whatever the posted article is about relating to this technology. This is one of those threads. Nix seems to have one of the worst discussion quality around here. Rust threads are similar (thou…
You're not helping though. If you want that to be different, focus on different things rather than bringing attention to what you're complaining about.
Why though?
I didn't see it mentioned yet and maybe there are valid reasons for that happening that I'm not aware of.
Also, discussing the thread in itself seems more relevant than how hard/confusing/woke you find a language.
I'm not here making a call to action or trying to police the thread, if anyone want to go off topic be guest.
Re: The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded
#123There 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…
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 as a first class citizen. And I want to arbitrarily target any platform.
What this really comes down to is that Linux C/C++ toolchains are badly designed. Nix is a huge massive convoluted architecture to try and twist itself around that unfortunate reality.
At least that’s my spicy unpopular opinion that is probably wrong but is at least has elements of truth.
Re: The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why ask this? Maybe they are? Maybe they aren't, and that's ok too.
Why not ask this? People are burning out here. Meanwhile corporations be making billions. I don't like that.
That's the social contract with open-source software. You are not owed a cent for your work. But they're not owed support either.
On the other hand, building an entire company atop experimental software that might explode or cease to exist tomorrow seems so monumentally stupid that the inevitable business failure is the outcome they don't need, but so badly deserve.
Re: The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded
#125For 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]…
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 author of the 3rd blog post) "turning on" them after they tried to work with the moderation team, whatever that means.
The third blog post complains that the moderation team was too large, had a lot of absenteeism problems, and tried to do everything by consensus which didn't work with the large size combined with the absenteeism problems.
The last post is most revealing. It's also the least dramatic. It looks to me like they tried to form a way too large group of people who treated this as a low priority, then tried to do everything by heavy procedures and consensus with half the team not showing up. That's a common mistake in community organization that leads to collapse.
EDIT: I looked up the conversation about the NixOS moderation team resigning. Apparently the moderation team was causing a lot of their own problems within the community. I'm not going to read it all, but this looks like familiar overzealous moderator drama
My favorite example so far was that someone got banned and one of the conditions for getting unbanned was removing steak from their profile picture: https://github.com/NixOS/moderation/commit/e9d67b7efa03e6e9b...
Re: The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded
#126[flagged]
We've banned this account for repeatedly posting unsubstantive and inflammatory comments like this. The guidelines require us to be kind, to avoid flamebait, and to comment without sneering/snark among other things. If you don't want to be banned, you can email us at hn@ycombinator.com and commit to observing the guidelines in future. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Re: The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded
#127Earlier 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.
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.”
Re: The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
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The Internet was fully functional and full of competent people when it was a much weirder place. Converting all spaces into the equivalent of dress shirts and blazers doesn't reduce anyone's competence but does make the experience so much more drab. Let people like things.
There is more to variety than the FAANG bro and the non-binary furry with anime profile picture, yet it’s all you see in tech these days. None of these were the stereotypes, say, 25 years ago.
Re: The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded
#129[dead]
Re: The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded
#130For 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…
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