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> DetSys already provides their own Nix installer That installer has actually been developed with community collaboration from outside DetSys from early on in

by pxc 3y ago

> DetSys already provides their own Nix installer That installer has actually been developed with community collaboration from outside DetSys from early on in its lifecycle via the Nix Installer Working Group¹, which includes stakeholders from other companies and whoever else volunteered to get involved. I haven't followed it super closely recently, but to the best of my knowledge DetSys has done a good job with that project of orienting themselves towards the wider community and upstreaming that work. FWIW, the maintainer of and chief contributor to that project is also extremely responsive to community activity on GitHub as well. I reported a few bugs the other day and was frankly delighted by how it went. It's being developed in the open, like proper open-source. The Determinate Nix Installer is not at all a 'let's do this in-house, behind closed doors, then throw it over the fence' kind of effort. -- 1: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nix-installer-workgroup/21495/20 https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nix-installer-workgroup/21495/...

jolux 3y ago
Oh yeah, I have no criticisms with how that project is being run. But obviously they still decided to launch it instead of working to upstream it.
- biggestlou 3y ago
  Point of clarification: we are fully open to upstreaming the installer in whole or in part and have been from the get-go.[^1] But the installer is a pretty radical departure from the current official installer. The official installer is written in Bash; the DetSys installer is written in Rust. The official installer targets fairly "standard" platforms; the DetSys installer has experimental support for things like the SteamDeck. And so on. We think it's perfectly okay to have that kind of distribution of labor in OSS, where core/upstream things need to be extremely stable and conservative while the community runs experiments and figures out what works and doesn't. [1]: https://determinate.systems/posts/determinate-nix-installer#the-future-of-the-installer https://determinate.systems/posts/determinate-nix-installer#...
  - jolux 3y ago
    The default installer doesn't even support uninstalling Nix, which was a real pain when I tried to do so. > We think it's perfectly okay to have that kind of distribution of labor in OSS, where core/upstream things need to be extremely stable and conservative while the community runs experiments and figures out what works and doesn't. I hope nothing I said suggested I didn't think this was ok. I really appreciate that the DetSys installer exists. I'm just not sure why anyone would use the default installer given that it does.

by pxc 3y ago

jolux 3y ago

Oh yeah, I have no criticisms with how that project is being run. But obviously they still decided to launch it instead of working to upstream it.

biggestlou 3y ago
Point of clarification: we are fully open to upstreaming the installer in whole or in part and have been from the get-go.[^1] But the installer is a pretty radical departure from the current official installer. The official installer is written in Bash; the DetSys installer is written in Rust. The official installer targets fairly "standard" platforms; the DetSys installer has experimental support for things like the SteamDeck. And so on. We think it's perfectly okay to have that kind of distribution of labor in OSS, where core/upstream things need to be extremely stable and conservative while the community runs experiments and figures out what works and doesn't. [1]: https://determinate.systems/posts/determinate-nix-installer#the-future-of-the-installer https://determinate.systems/posts/determinate-nix-installer#...
- jolux 3y ago
  The default installer doesn't even support uninstalling Nix, which was a real pain when I tried to do so. > We think it's perfectly okay to have that kind of distribution of labor in OSS, where core/upstream things need to be extremely stable and conservative while the community runs experiments and figures out what works and doesn't. I hope nothing I said suggested I didn't think this was ok. I really appreciate that the DetSys installer exists. I'm just not sure why anyone would use the default installer given that it does.