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Nix is slowly becoming a major point of contention. In some communities, it’s already scary to even hint that one dislikes it.

ninjin 6y ago
Blindly going after dissenters and/or alternative opinions is never a good thing, which communities would that be? In the ones that I frequent Nix is still a bit of a fringe phenomena reserved for nutters such as myself. From inside the Nix community it is from my perspective far more relaxed than most OS communities that I have been a part of over the last two decades.
- va1en0k 6y ago
  It'd be probably easy to guess which communities I mean, but I'd rather not name names myself and hope someone supports me with a datapoint to offset my personal paranoia. Lately I encountered quite a lot of software - fringe and weird of course, but numerous enough - that went for having Nix as the only way to be deployed, typically with a "reproducible" script that doesn't work already after a year or two. As nix files make negative intuitive sense, not even in the smallest-scale bit-fiddling sense, so little intuitive sense that I cried once trying to just make it work - I look around for advice. One of "just take a couple of weeks to learn it, it's not that hard" is seen quickly enough, of course. It's a bit of pure loss from there: everyone who heard something like this knows that it's the moment to either invest fully or ignore and quietly move on and away. Confessing that you just don't think you'd find it in yourself to invest in it is almost a pure loss for one. However, since we're not in one of those communities, let me say why not. I'm as sure that the good idea of reproducible builds will be implemented soon enough with something intuitive, strongly-typed, easily debuggable/diagnostable and dev-friendly, as I'm sure that diesel cars will be obsolete soon enough not to even think about investing my time and money in them. Regardless of what the current usage says - e.g. in Germany one would make a mistake to follow its wisdom just a few years ago, in case of cars, I mean.
  - doyouhearu 6y ago
    I'm quite curious, do people like you review your comment threads and consider how they look to others? You made a pretty serious implication that Nix users are hostile, in the context of certain projects. Given that numerous people have indicated how helpful they've found the Nix community, someone prompted you for more details. Instead of providing those details you wrote three rambling hand-waving, non-specific paragraphs that frankly, say nothing. > that went for having Nix as the only way to be deployed, typically with a "reproducible" script that doesn't work already after a year or two I mean, if you have no problem saying things like that given how ignorant they make you look, I guess maybe you don't care. EDIT: It's funny because I can think of a distinct counter example, a couple months back a newcomer wanted to push Nix on other projects and the overwhelming feedback from the community was to not do that. My experience over many years differ severely with this insidious implication that Nix users are hostile (especially when your second post literally boils down to "I didn't understand Nix and couldn't be bothered".) I keep running into this mentality where people project negative emotions onto others when something winds up being non-trivial to pick-up, and I just don't get it.
deleted 6y ago
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ninjin 6y ago

Blindly going after dissenters and/or alternative opinions is never a good thing, which communities would that be? In the ones that I frequent Nix is still a bit of a fringe phenomena reserved for nutters such as myself. From inside the Nix community it is from my perspective far more relaxed than most OS communities that I have been a part of over the last two decades.

va1en0k 6y ago
It'd be probably easy to guess which communities I mean, but I'd rather not name names myself and hope someone supports me with a datapoint to offset my personal paranoia. Lately I encountered quite a lot of software - fringe and weird of course, but numerous enough - that went for having Nix as the only way to be deployed, typically with a "reproducible" script that doesn't work already after a year or two. As nix files make negative intuitive sense, not even in the smallest-scale bit-fiddling sense, so little intuitive sense that I cried once trying to just make it work - I look around for advice. One of "just take a couple of weeks to learn it, it's not that hard" is seen quickly enough, of course. It's a bit of pure loss from there: everyone who heard something like this knows that it's the moment to either invest fully or ignore and quietly move on and away. Confessing that you just don't think you'd find it in yourself to invest in it is almost a pure loss for one. However, since we're not in one of those communities, let me say why not. I'm as sure that the good idea of reproducible builds will be implemented soon enough with something intuitive, strongly-typed, easily debuggable/diagnostable and dev-friendly, as I'm sure that diesel cars will be obsolete soon enough not to even think about investing my time and money in them. Regardless of what the current usage says - e.g. in Germany one would make a mistake to follow its wisdom just a few years ago, in case of cars, I mean.
- doyouhearu 6y ago
  I'm quite curious, do people like you review your comment threads and consider how they look to others? You made a pretty serious implication that Nix users are hostile, in the context of certain projects. Given that numerous people have indicated how helpful they've found the Nix community, someone prompted you for more details. Instead of providing those details you wrote three rambling hand-waving, non-specific paragraphs that frankly, say nothing. > that went for having Nix as the only way to be deployed, typically with a "reproducible" script that doesn't work already after a year or two I mean, if you have no problem saying things like that given how ignorant they make you look, I guess maybe you don't care. EDIT: It's funny because I can think of a distinct counter example, a couple months back a newcomer wanted to push Nix on other projects and the overwhelming feedback from the community was to not do that. My experience over many years differ severely with this insidious implication that Nix users are hostile (especially when your second post literally boils down to "I didn't understand Nix and couldn't be bothered".) I keep running into this mentality where people project negative emotions onto others when something winds up being non-trivial to pick-up, and I just don't get it.

deleted 6y ago

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