Agreed that releasing stuff isn’t necessary, especially stuff propping up the ecosystem.
Unfortunately, I think the rest of your statements are exactly inverted: the nixpkgs repo is pretty difficult to fork (moves fast, needs expensive CI/caches to properly operate), and while we may still have the nix expression language (and hey, lix is a good implementation of it!), I’m getting more and more convinced that it is not such a blessing.
The phd thesis though, that one is pretty good (currently reading it for realsies); lots of good ideas in it, regardless one’s thoughts about the expression language (:
“average nix contributor is removed from project 3 times a year" factoid actualy just statistical error. average contributor stays on the project. Mod Actions Jon, who lives in cave & becomes a contributor 10,000 times each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted
Maybe when babies don’t have to be squeezed out a way too small bony orifice at great risk to the orifice-bearer, women will finally get to be people in his eyes.
I was wondering if we are looking at the same map, and then it turns out there are two Valley Forges: one is a neighborhood in (yep!) the Philly suburbs, the other is a township next to York, PA. The latter is what I was referring to!
“Suburbs of Philadelphia” is pretty funny to me - it’s a 2:15+h car ride there from Philly. Americans might consider 100 miles a short commute, but dang. When does a part of PA stop being a Philly suburb and start being a Pittsburgh suburb?
York and the surrounding counties are currently very much a culture war battleground. There’s a bunch of school board initiated censorship, bomb threats against libraries (and then subsequent defunding of those unless they promise not to do anything that could cause offense to domestic terrorists), that sort of thing. (Edit: forgot to mention the hate tracker, some more stuff I didn’t think I wanted to know about my own neighbors)
That crap is done by people and I imagine these folks are among those doing it, and so are their friends and neighbors.
One of the really cool bits about this fork is that it exposes the way in which all sorts of parts of the nix ecosystem are required to move in lockstep with cppnix: I tried lix out, and immediately this fails to build if you use hydra (the nix CI system, also headed by edolstra). Surprise: it links in cppnix for some evaluation magic, and does so using unstable APIs that change wildly from release to release.
In positive News, there is now a zulip (yep, the chat system with the threads) instance where nix governance gets discussed, with a faiiiirly reasonable and toothsome code of conduct. I don’t want to hope too much but maybe there is a way this project can heal, I’d certainly appreciate not having to spend person-months migrating all my personal computing to some much worse platform.
It’s funny, by some metrics it is intensely popular: GitHub contributor count and daily commit volume would be two… but it definitely is a vanishingly small user base compared to Fedora or Ubuntu or, lol, Android, ofc.
That contributor count metric is also a fun one to consider when people complain about politics in OSS - this is the size of a small municipality, of course there’s going to be politics.
Agreed that releasing stuff isn’t necessary, especially stuff propping up the ecosystem.
Unfortunately, I think the rest of your statements are exactly inverted: the nixpkgs repo is pretty difficult to fork (moves fast, needs expensive CI/caches to properly operate), and while we may still have the nix expression language (and hey, lix is a good implementation of it!), I’m getting more and more convinced that it is not such a blessing.
The phd thesis though, that one is pretty good (currently reading it for realsies); lots of good ideas in it, regardless one’s thoughts about the expression language (: