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nixpkgs packages pretty much everything I need. It’s a very large package set and very fresh. It’s mostly about culture and tooling. I tried to contribute to De

nixpkgs packages pretty much everything I need. It’s a very large package set and very fresh. It’s mostly about culture and tooling. I tried to contribute to Debian once and gave up after months. I was contributing to nixpkgs days after I started using Nix. Having every package as part of a distribution is immensely useful. You can declaratively define your whole system with all software. I can roll out a desktop, development VM or server within 5 minutes and it’s fully configured.

jorvi 2y ago
The problem with NixOS (Nix?) is that it is currently embroiled in a culture war. Just to give an example, someone made an April's Fools joke about Elon Musk sponsoring NixOS and they got their post muted and (almost?) caught a suspension. There is currently a gazillion forks, some being forks of forks because they weren't considered culturally pure enough for the culturally purged fork. Hopefully Determinate Systems or Ekela can get some real maturity and corporate funding into the system and pull the whole thing out of the quagmire.
- anonfordays 2y ago
  >Just to give an example, someone made an April's Fools joke about Elon Musk sponsoring NixOS and they got their post muted and (almost?) caught a suspension. This can't be real. Are you sure it was something innocuous and not something bigoted?
  - mtndew4brkfst 2y ago
    Real as you or me, though I disagree with almost everything else the quoted poster expressed other than that forks are happening and the dividing lines include cultural norms rather than strictly technical disagreements. https://discourse.nixos.org/t/breaking-doge-to-recommend-nix-widely/62490 https://discourse.nixos.org/t/breaking-doge-to-recommend-nix... Same author quoted the original text on their Reddit thread and was mostly uncriticized there: https://old.reddit.com/r/NixOS/comments/1joshae/breaking_doge_to_recommend_nix_widely/mkuw5xa/ https://old.reddit.com/r/NixOS/comments/1joshae/breaking_dog... I personally found it incredibly distasteful and also fairly representative of the quality of conversation you often get from some of the Nix community. I'm not offensive, you're just thin skinned, can't you take a joke, etc. is extremely common. You'll have to judge for yourself whether it's bigoted or dog whistle or neither. I'm a former casual community member with modest open source work in that ecosystem (projects and handful of nixpkgs PRs) before I left permanently last spring. I no longer endorse its use for any purpose and I seek to replace every piece of it that I was using. I still hear about the ways they continue to royally fuck up their governance and make negligible progress on detoxifying the culture. It took them until last fucking week to ban Anduril from making hiring posts on the same official forum.
    - anonfordays 2y ago
      Am I supposed to seriously believe people found that so offensive that the poster was banned for that? Were those crying, feigning offence, being satirical themselves? Truly Poe's Law at work here. >I personally found it incredibly distasteful How? Why? It's clearly satire, written in the style of The Onion. >and also fairly representative of the quality of conversation you often get from some of the Nix community Good satire? At least some members aren't brainrotted out to the point of no return. > I'm not offensive, you're just thin skinned, can't you take a joke, etc. It's clearly not offensive and if that upset you, you clearly have thin skin and can't take the blandest of jokes. Histrionic. >I no longer endorse its use for any purpose and I seek to replace every piece of it that I was using. I will also tell others not to use Nix after reading that. The community is indeed too toxic. >I still hear about the ways they continue to royally fuck up their governance and make negligible progress on detoxifying the culture. They won't detoxify until they remove all the weak neurotic leftist activists with weird fetishes for "underrepresented minorities." >It took them until last fucking week to ban Anduril from making hiring posts on the same official forum. I'm not sure who that is or why it's an issue, but I assume it's something only leftists cry about.
- microtonal 2y ago
  Yes Nix is forked. There were some attempts to fork nixpkgs, but they failed because it's far too much work to maintain something like nixpkgs. Nix being forked is less of an issue, because at the very least everyone needs to be compatible with nixpkgs. I think it's ok to have multiple implementations, they lead to exploration of new directions (e.g. one of the projects attempts to reimplement Nix in Rust). Well and of course, Guix started as a fork. I agree that the infighting is not nice. But to be honest, when you just use NixOS and submit PRs, you do not really notice them. It's not like people are fighting them in the actual PRs to nixpkgs.
  - mtndew4brkfst 2y ago
    Some of the more drawn-out arguments are in or about the RFCs repo, though, so it's not just chat platforms or forum where the fights break out. To your point the RFC repo is also something that not every would-be contributor would touch or need to.
  - jorvi 2y ago
    I agree, but it makes me feel supremely uneasy to use something where the main team does Soviet-style purges where they mute/exile/ban community members not because they were being offensive but because they committed wrongthink. Even worse is that they're often prolific devs. Ironically enough the closest comparison I could make is driving a Tesla. Even if the product is great, you're supporting an organisation that is the opposite. I think the Nix team will continue to slowly chase away competent people until the rot makes the whole thing wither, at which point everyone switches their upstream over to Determinate Systems' their open core. Although I'm hoping DS will ultimately go the RHEL-Fedora route.
subsection1h 2y ago
> nixpkgs packages pretty much everything I need. Yeah, because they allow anyone to contribute with little oversight. As Lance Vick wrote[1], "Nixpkgs is the NPM of Linux." And Solène Rapenne wrote[2], "It is quite easy to get nixpkgs commit access, a supply chain attack would be easy to achieve in my opinion: there are so many commits done that it is impossible for a trustable group to review everything, and there are too many contributors to be sure they are all trustable." [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34105784 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34105784 [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20240429013622/https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2024-04-27-nix-internal-crisis.html https://web.archive.org/web/20240429013622/https://dataswamp...
- microtonal 2y ago
  Pretty much every PR does get reviewed before merging (especially of non-committers) and compromises would be easy to detect in the typical version bump PR. At least it's all out in the open in a big monorepo. E.g. in Debian, maintainers could push binaries directly to the archive a few years ago (I think this is still true for non-main) and IIRC even for source packages people upload them with little oversight and they are not all in open version control. Of course, Debian developers/maintainers are vetted more. But an intentional compromise in nixpkgs would be much more visible than in Debian, NPM, PyPI or crates.io.

jorvi 2y ago

The problem with NixOS (Nix?) is that it is currently embroiled in a culture war. Just to give an example, someone made an April's Fools joke about Elon Musk sponsoring NixOS and they got their post muted and (almost?) caught a suspension. There is currently a gazillion forks, some being forks of forks because they weren't considered culturally pure enough for the culturally purged fork. Hopefully Determinate Systems or Ekela can get some real maturity and corporate funding into the system and pull the whole thing out of the quagmire.

anonfordays 2y ago
>Just to give an example, someone made an April's Fools joke about Elon Musk sponsoring NixOS and they got their post muted and (almost?) caught a suspension. This can't be real. Are you sure it was something innocuous and not something bigoted?
- mtndew4brkfst 2y ago
  Real as you or me, though I disagree with almost everything else the quoted poster expressed other than that forks are happening and the dividing lines include cultural norms rather than strictly technical disagreements. https://discourse.nixos.org/t/breaking-doge-to-recommend-nix-widely/62490 https://discourse.nixos.org/t/breaking-doge-to-recommend-nix... Same author quoted the original text on their Reddit thread and was mostly uncriticized there: https://old.reddit.com/r/NixOS/comments/1joshae/breaking_doge_to_recommend_nix_widely/mkuw5xa/ https://old.reddit.com/r/NixOS/comments/1joshae/breaking_dog... I personally found it incredibly distasteful and also fairly representative of the quality of conversation you often get from some of the Nix community. I'm not offensive, you're just thin skinned, can't you take a joke, etc. is extremely common. You'll have to judge for yourself whether it's bigoted or dog whistle or neither. I'm a former casual community member with modest open source work in that ecosystem (projects and handful of nixpkgs PRs) before I left permanently last spring. I no longer endorse its use for any purpose and I seek to replace every piece of it that I was using. I still hear about the ways they continue to royally fuck up their governance and make negligible progress on detoxifying the culture. It took them until last fucking week to ban Anduril from making hiring posts on the same official forum.
  - anonfordays 2y ago
    Am I supposed to seriously believe people found that so offensive that the poster was banned for that? Were those crying, feigning offence, being satirical themselves? Truly Poe's Law at work here. >I personally found it incredibly distasteful How? Why? It's clearly satire, written in the style of The Onion. >and also fairly representative of the quality of conversation you often get from some of the Nix community Good satire? At least some members aren't brainrotted out to the point of no return. > I'm not offensive, you're just thin skinned, can't you take a joke, etc. It's clearly not offensive and if that upset you, you clearly have thin skin and can't take the blandest of jokes. Histrionic. >I no longer endorse its use for any purpose and I seek to replace every piece of it that I was using. I will also tell others not to use Nix after reading that. The community is indeed too toxic. >I still hear about the ways they continue to royally fuck up their governance and make negligible progress on detoxifying the culture. They won't detoxify until they remove all the weak neurotic leftist activists with weird fetishes for "underrepresented minorities." >It took them until last fucking week to ban Anduril from making hiring posts on the same official forum. I'm not sure who that is or why it's an issue, but I assume it's something only leftists cry about.
microtonal 2y ago
Yes Nix is forked. There were some attempts to fork nixpkgs, but they failed because it's far too much work to maintain something like nixpkgs. Nix being forked is less of an issue, because at the very least everyone needs to be compatible with nixpkgs. I think it's ok to have multiple implementations, they lead to exploration of new directions (e.g. one of the projects attempts to reimplement Nix in Rust). Well and of course, Guix started as a fork. I agree that the infighting is not nice. But to be honest, when you just use NixOS and submit PRs, you do not really notice them. It's not like people are fighting them in the actual PRs to nixpkgs.
- mtndew4brkfst 2y ago
  Some of the more drawn-out arguments are in or about the RFCs repo, though, so it's not just chat platforms or forum where the fights break out. To your point the RFC repo is also something that not every would-be contributor would touch or need to.
- jorvi 2y ago
  I agree, but it makes me feel supremely uneasy to use something where the main team does Soviet-style purges where they mute/exile/ban community members not because they were being offensive but because they committed wrongthink. Even worse is that they're often prolific devs. Ironically enough the closest comparison I could make is driving a Tesla. Even if the product is great, you're supporting an organisation that is the opposite. I think the Nix team will continue to slowly chase away competent people until the rot makes the whole thing wither, at which point everyone switches their upstream over to Determinate Systems' their open core. Although I'm hoping DS will ultimately go the RHEL-Fedora route.

subsection1h 2y ago

> nixpkgs packages pretty much everything I need. Yeah, because they allow anyone to contribute with little oversight. As Lance Vick wrote[1], "Nixpkgs is the NPM of Linux." And Solène Rapenne wrote[2], "It is quite easy to get nixpkgs commit access, a supply chain attack would be easy to achieve in my opinion: there are so many commits done that it is impossible for a trustable group to review everything, and there are too many contributors to be sure they are all trustable." [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34105784 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34105784 [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20240429013622/https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2024-04-27-nix-internal-crisis.html https://web.archive.org/web/20240429013622/https://dataswamp...

microtonal 2y ago
Pretty much every PR does get reviewed before merging (especially of non-committers) and compromises would be easy to detect in the typical version bump PR. At least it's all out in the open in a big monorepo. E.g. in Debian, maintainers could push binaries directly to the archive a few years ago (I think this is still true for non-main) and IIRC even for source packages people upload them with little oversight and they are not all in open version control. Of course, Debian developers/maintainers are vetted more. But an intentional compromise in nixpkgs would be much more visible than in Debian, NPM, PyPI or crates.io.