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A leadership crisis in the Nix community

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Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#191

Post by orthecreedence »

tripdout wrote: post #104
aredox wrote: post #9

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 Nix is much simpler and more suited for software packaging than Scheme.

I don't think any general purpose language ever invented is simpler than lisp/scheme. I've not taken the time to familiarize myself with Nix yet, and one of the reasons is that the syntax of learning yet another language with its own idioms and syntax isn't something I care to tackle right now. I would love to reap the benefits of something like Nix, but something like Guix is much more appealing to me.

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#192

Post by lliamander »

ParetoOptimal wrote: post #76
cosmic_quanta wrote: post #40

> Anduril, a military contractor that uses NixOS, has repeatedly attempted to become a sponsor of NixCon, which did not go over well with the community Something similar happened in the Haskell community, where some people called for Anduril job postings to be removed. Nix is a software project, not a social movement. The goals of Nix are entirely separate from how the software is used. I really like Coinbase's state…

> Nix is a software project, not a social movement. Upholding the status quo is a social (and political) movement, it's just the most popular and accepted one.

The mission of reproducible builds is a social mission that will bring good to the world regardless of whether other social goods are achieved.

Trying to tie that mission to other social movements is a strategic error that will more than likely cause Nix to fail in its primary mission while doing virtually nothing meaningful for any of those other causes.

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#193

Post by zer00eyz »

fireflash38 wrote: post #132
ParetoOptimal wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> targeting "ideas rooted in fascism or bigotry" Is targeting "ideas rooted in fascism or bigotry" a bad thing?

What do you do when people who claim to be targeting fascist ideals also use the same tactics as those they're targeting?

You make them take all the words they dont like out of their copy of 1984.

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#194

Post by lliamander »

Shrezzing wrote: post #136
cosmic_quanta wrote: post #40

> Anduril, a military contractor that uses NixOS, has repeatedly attempted to become a sponsor of NixCon, which did not go over well with the community Something similar happened in the Haskell community, where some people called for Anduril job postings to be removed. Nix is a software project, not a social movement. The goals of Nix are entirely separate from how the software is used. I really like Coinbase's state…

There are a lot of people who will find their workplace being singularly "mission focused" a good thing, but 5% of Coinbase's staff announced that they'd be leaving within one working week of that post[1], and others followed shortly after. I think that shows that in a corporate environment, it's not possible to retain all of the best staff if you're very publicly burying your head in the sand with regards to social…

No matter how smart or skilled they are, people who spend an inordinate amount of time arguing politics (and dragging others into it) at work are by definition not "the best staff".

Having a narrow mission focus is the only way to retain your actual best staff.

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#195

Post by bee_rider »

saulrh wrote: post #148
bee_rider wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Contributors to open source projects aren’t asking the question “should the thing be done,” they are asking the question “should I do the thing.” I think lots of people fall into the general bucket of “sure, the military is necessary for a country, but I don’t personally want to work on it.” It is a weird sort of diffused understanding of responsibility (we all pay taxes and our representatives vote on whether or not…

If you want this in formal terms: "pulling the trigger" and "living with yourself after pulling the trigger" are both skills that some people have and other people don't, those skills exist on a continuum of both directness and effectiveness, and comparative advantage applies all the way down at the level of individuals and their personal skillsets. Even if you support your polity's military aims your polity's milita…

That’s an interesting way of looking at it. Somebody could think about maximizing the effectiveness of society at doing war, while admitting that their competitive advantage doesn’t lay in directly doing violence. I don’t think I’ve seen that before, and I don’t think it is how most of the people who come to the conclusion that they’d rather not contribute directly to the military come to that conclusion. But it is an interesting line of thought.

I think most people just feel differently about things they do directly, than they do about things they indirectly contribute to through taxes or just existing in the economy, and don’t put a ton of thought into it.

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#196

Post by takeda »

ParetoOptimal wrote: post #167
takeda wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole idea behind Open Source is that one does not discriminate. As a Nix user I feel like those people who started this whole drama are actually negative to this project. They are trying to use Nix as a tool for their political goals. I think the best for Nix would be to just move forward and ignore them.

> As a Nix user I feel like those people who started this whole drama are actually negative to this project. The people who signed Anduril as a sponsor, apologized to the community, and signed Anduril as a sponsor again anyway started this drama and are a negative.

So what?

The nature of Open Source is that Abduril can use it anyway and it is more whether Nix can get funding to help it become mainstream.

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#197

Post by lliamander »

ParetoOptimal wrote: post #127
tripdout wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On one hand, I struggle to think that people might actually care about switching "master" to "main", as opposed to making wider improvements to inclusivity. On the other hand, I don't have a strong attachment at all to naming a branch "master" and can easily rename it without a second thought.

> On one hand, I struggle to think that people might actually care about switching "master" to "main", as opposed to making wider improvements to inclusivity. I thought it wasn't a big issue until I saw how hard one side fought to keep the name "master". After that I changed my mind and name all of my branches main and give a little push to projects I'm part of to do the same. Plus, words do have power: https://www.y…

> I thought it wasn't a big issue until I saw how hard one side fought to keep the name "master".

They only fight that hard because they know the people fighting to remove "master" are (as a group) acting in bad faith.

On this and many other issues they tend to lie about history and language, extort those who don't comply with threats of sabotage towards their projects and/or careers, and will equivocate and dissemble whenever confronted.

It's perfectly fine want to use "main" rather than "master" (that is probably my preference). And it is perfectly fine to suggest other people do as well. But if you suggest it others and they tell "no" (politely or not), the right thing for you to do at that point is to mind your own business.

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#198

Post by busterarm »

dzogchen wrote: post #56
aredox wrote: post #9

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…

The main reason for the persistence of C 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 C. [Insert systems programming language du jour] or any other well-developed language makes more sense.

It's not just "first-mover advantage". I wouldn't even say it's mainly first-mover advantage.

It's the need to maintain super legacy systems and interoperability. There are entire CPU architectures that LLVM does not support and are only commonly supported by C and these things are still everywhere and are really gnarly problems to replace them.

Even if you throw everything away on the software side and start over from scratch, that's going to _force_ you to replace some hardware somewhere that you won't or can't replace.

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#199

Post by slekker »

orthecreedence wrote: post #191
tripdout wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Nix is much simpler and more suited for software packaging than Scheme.

I don't think any general purpose language ever invented is simpler than lisp/scheme. I've not taken the time to familiarize myself with Nix yet, and one of the reasons is that the syntax of learning yet another language with its own idioms and syntax isn't something I care to tackle right now. I would love to reap the benefits of something like Nix, but something like Guix is much more appealing to me.

A shame Guix does not work on Mac and probably never will
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