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Not necessarily... Nix is compelling enough today that it could experience explosive growth even if core development was completely stuck. If that was the case,

Not necessarily... Nix is compelling enough today that it could experience explosive growth even if core development was completely stuck. If that was the case, newcomers would still find enough value to stick around and spread the word, but existing pain points would go unaddressed. I'm not close enough to Nix development to know whether this is the case or not in this instance, but the Discourse post makes a compelling argument about pull request statistics. Sibling commenters also point out that flakes have become a de facto standard despite being hidden behind an experimental flag, suggesting that the flag has lingered too long and without clear ownership or authority around stabilizing the feature. That indecision feels like floundering.

pxc 4y ago
> Nix is compelling enough today that it could experience explosive growth even if core development was completely stuck. [...] I [do not] know whether this is the case It felt like that to me for a really long time, in between the releases of Nix 2.3 and 2.4, when there were lots of features being added but there was no release schedule. The divide between flakes users and non-flakes users was also larger then, as the feature was gated behind not just an experimental flag, but pre-release versions of Nix. Since then, Nix has gotten into a regular, fairly rapid release cycle and new functionality is released pretty often. There are various concerns about what that change does and doesn't fix for Nix, but for me at least there's no longer that feeling of stagnation or mystery about when Nix will see a stable update released. > flakes have become a de facto standard despite being hidden behind an experimental flag, suggesting that the flag has lingered too long and without clear ownership or authority around stabilizing the feature. That indecision feels like floundering Flakes have been conceived and pushed forward by the original author and chief maintainer of Nix. In the earliest stages of their development, consensus proved difficult to build and the community RFC process was very young. Suspending that RFC and adding the features to the master branch but marking them 'experimental' was an attempted compromise on the part of Eelco Dolstra, who had previously more or less taken a BDFL approach to maintaining Nix. Since then, the flakes implementation has matured quite a bit. I think most users expect that it will evolve into an official feature soon and without many fundamental changes, although some community members still feel some bitterness about that initial process as well as skepticism about the scope and necessity of the whole suite of features that come with flakes. At the same time, many RFCs have gone through the process since then. The organization of the projects and processes for getting ambitious changes approved are much more explicit now. In those ways, it's clear that leadership/governance in the Nix community is becoming more organized and more effective.

pxc 4y ago

> Nix is compelling enough today that it could experience explosive growth even if core development was completely stuck. [...] I [do not] know whether this is the case It felt like that to me for a really long time, in between the releases of Nix 2.3 and 2.4, when there were lots of features being added but there was no release schedule. The divide between flakes users and non-flakes users was also larger then, as the feature was gated behind not just an experimental flag, but pre-release versions of Nix. Since then, Nix has gotten into a regular, fairly rapid release cycle and new functionality is released pretty often. There are various concerns about what that change does and doesn't fix for Nix, but for me at least there's no longer that feeling of stagnation or mystery about when Nix will see a stable update released. > flakes have become a de facto standard despite being hidden behind an experimental flag, suggesting that the flag has lingered too long and without clear ownership or authority around stabilizing the feature. That indecision feels like floundering Flakes have been conceived and pushed forward by the original author and chief maintainer of Nix. In the earliest stages of their development, consensus proved difficult to build and the community RFC process was very young. Suspending that RFC and adding the features to the master branch but marking them 'experimental' was an attempted compromise on the part of Eelco Dolstra, who had previously more or less taken a BDFL approach to maintaining Nix. Since then, the flakes implementation has matured quite a bit. I think most users expect that it will evolve into an official feature soon and without many fundamental changes, although some community members still feel some bitterness about that initial process as well as skepticism about the scope and necessity of the whole suite of features that come with flakes. At the same time, many RFCs have gone through the process since then. The organization of the projects and processes for getting ambitious changes approved are much more explicit now. In those ways, it's clear that leadership/governance in the Nix community is becoming more organized and more effective.