flizzo @ flizzo @awful.systems

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1 yr. ago

I've been out-of-the-loop for a bit on the Nix drama. Is there a good summary of the last couple weeks?

This is my favorite thing to do.

This post has "everything" in the same way as the buffet of the Beau Rivage at midnight: the goods are warmed over, but the overs are good warm.

the odd sobriquet of Auxolotl

Has the pendulum swung back already? I make it to parenthood just in time for puns to fall out of favor?

Now that Dr Dolstra has gone

Dr Dolstra

This particular curmudgeon, though, feels that this particular Nix fork missed a big opportunity: to automatically generate and manage more human-readable filesystems.

The cardinal sin of Nix is apparently naming things. Since Aux exists for any other reason than fixing this, it has not atoned and can never atone.

Nix works wonders by automatically storing code in a software-generated and software-managed directory hierarchy. This has a profoundly off-putting side-effect: it eliminates a human-readable filesystem.

A specter is haunting Linux - the specter of /nix/store.

This particular jaded old hack much prefers the approach of GoboLinux.

And what is the solution? FreeBSD PortsGoboLinux!

What Gobo offers is akin to semantic versioning, but applied to the filesystem: a semantic filesystem layout, where folder names encapsulate versioning info and are more meaningful than the old 1970s reduce-typing-effort-at-all-costs approach.

Cool, semantic versioning, that will save us.

The thing is, though, that we were all beginners once, and anything that makes Unix even more forbidding for both beginners and veterans is a problem.

The last great addition to Linux was FHS 2.3, apparently.

I don't want to give this more oxygen than it deserves by making a separate post, but Jon Ringer has finally exhausted Reddit.

I honestly think the big win coming out of the most recent events is framing https://github.com/nixos/nix as "CppNix". There are lots of good explanations about how each of the pieces relates to one another, but for practical purposes, many of those pieces live in one place, and now we can all call that place CppNix, which sounds...less than ideal! I think it's the thing that will make clear just how dependent the whole enterprise is on that piece, and just how tightly that piece is controlled, even if other people on the CppNix team think that something like a fork is overkill and that things are better, because they can only be so good when CppNix is the default for a bunch of things it shouldn't be. Some of those other team members have been working to make that less true, and I think that's great, but I think a lot of recent documentation improvements have managed to hide the tight coupling, even if it wasn't intentional, and this makes it absolutely clear.

I understand why they chose this, but I think their failure to recognize the UX improvements of flakes limits their scope unnecessarily. I think they can be much more aggressive about how they cause regressions while acknowledging that maybe having a more structured system is good, even if that system is fundamentally broken in all sorts of ways.

“He’d burn a church for her.” He thinks, “I’m Ryan Gosling in Drive. I’m American Psycho. I’m Joker. I’m Taxi Driver.”

I love how clearly this communicates which of these she's seen.

Something that's been interesting to observe through all of this is just how much moderation matters to the quality of discussion in a space, no matter what the space is or who runs it.

There's some bitter irony to the fact that I've been getting nonstop notices about commits to the infamous "lazy trees" branch, the thing that is supposed to make flakes usable with monorepos (but in practice has yet to do so). Watching those notifications the last couple of days has told me all I needed to know.

There's a LWN piece that does a pretty good job with framing the specifics of this letter within some context. It gets some things wrong, such as stating that the arms manufacturer was rejected as a sponsor in both cases, but it has been corrected. The orange site is, of course, negging it with mod tools, showing that they're fine with mods pulling out the C-4 when it's their unelected mod team of choice.

I'm having fun thinking of infinite leather daddies whacking keyboards with dildos now.

If you or your loved ones have been exposed to the knowledge of dust specks, you may be entitled to compensation in a future simulation.

I've been fairly surprised by how poorly they've handled community engagement since they were "founded". If there's one good thing that can come of all this, it will be to make DetSys sufficiently toxic that they lose purchase in the larger enterprise and end up the first ones to blink with a fork. Some have suggested that they've all but done that already, and while there's no conclusive evidence, I'm looking forward to breaking out the popcorn if they end up trying to speedrun Hashicorp.

Big Daddy happily reminds Anduril that this should have no impact on their murder bot deliverables.