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It's true that the documentation situation is pretty rough. However, The problem with this is that common usage of Nix is in kind of a bizarre state at the mome
by sullyj3 4y ago
It's true that the documentation situation is pretty rough. However, The problem with this is that common usage of Nix is in kind of a bizarre state at the moment. We're in this limbo between the old `nix-` style commands and the new `nix ` commands, and between Not-flakes and flakes. These new features are labelled "experimental", but in practice they are widely used, and regarded as the inevitable future of the use of Nix.
You don't want to be putting enormous amounts of effort into documenting all of the confusing gotchas of a situation that will ideally go away soon.
It makes more sense to make a strong push for getting the new features fleshed out, made user friendly, and stabilized, and then slamming the brakes and doing a documentation push.
In practice, this will take a long time, and it probably makes sense to concurrently work on documenting things that won't change. But I don't think at this stage dropping all feature work for documentation makes sense.
The other thing is that I don't think Nix's learnability issues come entirely from lack of documentation. A big chunk of the problem is a lot of very strange UX decisions and confusing defaults. Rather than documenting these as is, it seems better to put effort into fixing them, making default behaviour more intuitive and less confusing.