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The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded
- rurban 1mo agoThe dissed Steering Comittee answer: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/the-scs-role-in-the-disbandment-of-the-nixpkgs-core-team/79433 https://discourse.nixos.org/t/the-scs-role-in-the-disbandmen... (They disagree)
- zb3 1mo ago[flagged]
- internetguy 1mo agowill nixpkgs still get updates? how will maintenance work (i am not familiar at all with the nix ecosystem so maybe this is a dumb q)
- threethirtytwo 1mo ago[flagged]
- anglesideangle 1mo agoMaintenance and updates will continue as usual. The maintainers formerly on the nixpkgs core team aren't even stopping their individual contributions.
- iwontberude 1mo ago[dead]
- talentedcoin 1mo agoWhy is the Nix community such a dumpster fire?
- domenkozar 1mo agoBecause people who do good work get attacked left and right and noone steps up.
- Avicebron 1mo ago[flagged]
- tkel 1mo agoIf you've been part of an organization or a community that has undergone a big conflict or a schism, you'd understand. Plus this community largely communicates exclusively over text, which doesn't really work well for community repair. It's difficult to get people to feel OK with each other, or spend time together not arguing, when they only ever write intense letters to each other. Plus social work with technical people that spend most of their lives looking at a computer, not interacting with people face-to-face, does not exactly lend itself to socio-emotional maturity. Seems like in the case of Nix, the more mature people have repeatedly gotten burned out trying to tend to the mess and create a healthy community. It's extremely difficult to get someone to be humble, listen, reflect, and grow, when they are already upset and have their defenses up. And without our normal human tools or other trusted peers to help, like we can call on in real life, it can sometimes be near impossible. Plus, in our highly individualized and hierarchical society, people don't have a lot of practice making decisions democratically, or coming to a consensus with people they disagree with. "Group projects" in grade school is pretty much the only time this happens during our socialization, which is incredibly sparse and inadequate. Anthropologically speaking, we should be doing this nearly every day.
- spott 1mo agohttps://jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html https://jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html Any organization is eventually controlled by people more interested in the organization than its mission. Or something to that effect. (Accidentally attached this to the wrong post, meant for the post above this)
- tkel 1mo agoTechnical people (or people with bad social skills) also love to inadequately and incorrectly try and turn the complexity of social organization into simple laws and rules. This kind of reduction doesn't really do people a service, and is also a bit arrogant and simple-minded. It would be much more interesting to name this as a tendency, and try to describe when and how it might occur, how the structure of the org might influence it, etc. Decontextualized takes projected onto everything like this are kind of misapplied and meaningless.
- nylonstrung 1mo agoThe most obvious cause was forcing BDFL and creator Eelco to step down https://lwn.net/Articles/970824/ https://lwn.net/Articles/970824/ The moderation team posted an open letter demanding he step down, among other reasons this accused him of jeopardizing the safety of people from "marginalized backgrounds" and allowing "fascists" in the community I have tried very hard to find any examples of what this is a actually referring to and genuinely have no idea https://github.com/save-nix-together/open-letter/blob/main/content%2Fposts%2Fletter.md https://github.com/save-nix-together/open-letter/blob/main/c...
- ____mr____ 1mo ago>The moderation team posted an open letter demanding he step down, among other reasons this accused him of jeopardizing the safety of people from "marginalized backgrounds" and allowing "fascists" in the community >For context, Anduril is a military contractor who produce drones using machine learning on Nvidia GPUs on NixOS as well as ML based systems for detecting migrants on the US-Mexico border, cheapening state violence against migrants. Given that ICE are currently breaking into peoples apartments and rounding people up into concentration camps, would it not be logical to conclude that the company providing software for the agency are fascists and by extension Eelco relitigating the sponsorship policy can be taken as allowing fascists in the community?
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- jonringer117 1mo agoIf you're unemployed enough, I have a long winded video on the 2022-2024 drama. From the perspective of the guy who was labeled a nazi and banned. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gp0FI8Gw1iA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gp0FI8Gw1iA
- farfatched 1mo agoThis was such a sad period, and I'm still sad at how you were treated. I hope in cooler times that the lifetime ban is lifted.
- trentnix 1mo agoIt's a combination of Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy and the emergence of WokeWare over the past decade. For too many, building and celebrating things just because they are cool isn't enough.
- __MatrixMan__ 1mo agoTechnology creates cliques. Some of them formed for good reasons, others maybe not. The nature of nix prevents the nix community from being a group of like minded people because it tries to be a unifying layer over technology which is not made by like minded people. To do what nix does, you need to overcome whatever forces caused those cliques to form in the first place. You need representatives from each group. It's a bit like congress, which has similar problems. And its not just disparate language communities. It's people who want to build influential businesses, and its people who want to insulate themselves against the influence of tech business. Its people who think it's OK to build killer robots, and it's people who don't want to be killed by those robots. Getting people work together is hard. Nixpkgs tries to do that to such a degree that you can put a version number the result. Maybe it's admirable, maybe it's folly. I think it's both. I'm not going to blame the people who are ambitious enough to try because as far as I'm aware, whatever other successful communities exist, they're succeeding at a less audacious goal.
- periodjet 1mo ago[flagged]
- tomhow 1mo agoWe've banned this account for repeatedly posting unsubstantive and inflammatory comments like this. The guidelines require us to be kind, to avoid flamebait, and to comment without sneering/snark among other things. If you don't want to be banned, you can email us at hn@ycombinator.com and commit to observing the guidelines in future. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- tonnikiki 1mo ago[flagged]
- ishanz 1mo agoNix package manager: correctly resolves dependency hell for your entire OS. Nix governance: still hasn't resolved dependency hell for humans apparently.
- stevefan1999 1mo agobut the dependency hell for human is inherently political
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- XorNot 1mo agoFor a certain definition of "correctly" (namely: it doesn't, it just does what containers do and ships unique versions for every package).
- otabdeveloper4 1mo agoContainers don't solve dependency hell. They just give you a standard way to ship your bespoke bash scripts. If you like writing bash scripts then go for it. (Personally I'd rather be doing literally anything else, like, I don't know, shoveling manure.)
- Brian_K_White 1mo agothat's what they said
- stevefan1999 1mo agoContainers do solve dependency hell by isolation. It's like venv/uv in Python that you switch between different environment with different sets of dependency. Or speaking essentially, you lifted yourself away from having dependencies shenanigans since you have virtualizations of it
- 1mo ago
- QwenGlazer9000 1mo agoHonestly after seeing the last election results I knew bad things were coming. The worst of the drama instigators managed to get elected.
- anglesideangle 1mo agoThe post has nothing to do with the election drama you cite: > These issues have persisted despite our repeated attempts to discuss them. This is, of course, a systemic problem rather than one any single SC member could solve; we don’t envy the demands of the role, have been impressed by the efforts of several members, and recognize that every individual naturally has limited time and energy and can only do so much in the context of a representative majoritarian committee.
- QwenGlazer9000 1mo agoI did. And half the post was them talking shit about the SC. Maybe you should read the post?
- ishanz 1mo ago[dead]
- aliasxneo 1mo agoI really don't think these issues are necessarily "systemic" in the sense that they've been ongoing for the last decade. I _was_ a long-time contributor until about two years ago when certain actors came into the community and started making a bunch of unnecessary drama. Since then I've seen some long-time friends in the community either slowly drop out or simply get ran out by a mob with pitch forks.
- stingraycharles 1mo agoIt is a systemic issue, though, when the system enables these certain actors to remain in position and cause the community to break apart like it’s doing.
- aliasxneo 1mo agoThat I agree with.
- indy 1mo agoMany such cases across all aspects of society.
- RossBencina 1mo agoIs it patchable? Are there any known-working fixes that can be broadly applied?
- stingraycharles 1mo ago“Our experience is that the Steering Committee as an institution lacks a native instinct for the delegation envisioned by the constitution, while also not being sufficiently engaged and cohesive to handle individual decisions at those levels itself.” This is an almost poetic description of micromanagement. I really like Nix and have been running it as my main OS for several years in the past ~ 10 years. I don’t think the issues they have are unsolvable, it just appears that the governance model they’re trying to have is not working out, and it’s very difficult to roll back.
- TheMagicHorsey 1mo agoThis phrase could have been authored about every single community leadership committee I've been a part of for the last 20 years.
- kesor 1mo agoThe governance of the project went into political extremes instead of focusing on technology. That made it impossible for anyone other than political extremists to continue in governance positions. Obviously these people had too much on their plate and couldn't find anyone who would join to help them, as they chased everyone away. Burn out was inevitable.
- astrobe_ 1mo agoThe whole paragraph describes quite well what I feel at the company I currently work for. I think it is more accurate to say that it is interference (rather than micromanagement) and goalpost shifting because whoever is/are in charge don't have a clear idea of where they are going.
- klodolph 1mo agoThere was a sweet spot in like 2024 when it seemed like everything was possible with Nix, but now it seems like everything “experimental” is permanently so (like flakes), packages I care about are not as fresh as I want, I have no mental recall for Nix commands… Meanwhile, my company is using Nix for everything heavily internally. Everyone gets their dependencies via Nix unless you are like using PAM or something. Reminds me of Bazel, in the way that it gets adopted by companies with developer support teams (because it solves real problems) but feels frustrating for us ordinary folk. Nixpkgs is kind of a critical part of “ordinary folk” and with the core team disbanding, I feel like my personal moves away from Nix (for projects) are proving correct.
- talentedcoin 1mo agoThis resonates with me as well. I was really into using Nix for awhile but it turned out to be more trouble than it was worth for a solo dev.
- hibikir 1mo agoIt gets worse when you are not a solo dev, and there's sufficient variety on people's setups. Oops, someone updated a version, and then built things for just their processor, and now I am stuck in a 20 minute compilation loop because some bad pin. Debugging Nix problems like those makes me think that old Gentoo Linux back in 2005 was easy and user friendly.
- mikepurvis 1mo agoThe way I set it up at my shop was that everything would build on your PR, and so by the time it merged, everything was already cached and no one should see a rebuild... at most a download.
- JamesSwift 1mo agoIm thinking through this for my team, any previous writeups on it? Or do you mind brain dumping the high level of how you had it setup from a design perspective : D
- Larrikin 1mo agoNix sounded great, but actually trying to use it for personal use felt like a constant time sink. LLMs made it seem like their bespoke language could be side stepped and one could get all the benefits of the ideas without the time sink. But now they have drama, so I hope someone runs with the idea but for humans and possibly LLMs.
- jbstack 1mo agoThe time sink thing is a trade off. You spend more time up front configuring some aspect of your system. But then you generally don't have to ever think about it again, until your needs change. For example: Ubuntu: a problem needs solving -> spend an hour learning how to solve it -> implement solution -> a year goes by -> new machine -> same problem -> spend an hour because you forgot the solution -> implement it again NixOS: problem -> spend 2 hours -> implement -> never repeat again
- soupbowl 1mo agoAfter being a heavy user of NixOS, I quit using it due to the communities instability, I don't trust it.
- aroman 1mo agoWhat alternative have you moved on to?
- talentedcoin 1mo agoI suggest giving Bazzite a try
- aroman 1mo agoI tried Fedora Silverblue and I found its notion/implementation of immutability fairly frustrating. It’s actually the reason I went to nixOS. It seemed to me that it was all the friction of immutability without any of the benefits of reproducibility.
- lrvick 1mo agohttps://stagex.tools https://stagex.tools
- doubled112 1mo agoI'm convinced that some day bootc (or something similar) will be exactly what I'm looking for, but not yet.
- talentedcoin 1mo agoVery true. I like the friction aspect to some extent because I think keeping the base system pure confers many benefits. But you’re right. Bazzite imposes a certain workflow. For installing new software … 1) try ujust first (since there is some porcelain provided for some things that can be challenging to install properly on immutable distros, such as Steam or DaVinci Resolve) 2) if that doesn’t work, try flatpaks from Bazaar/Flathub 3) if that doesn’t work, use Homebrew which installs into your home dir by default 4) use rpm-ostree as a last resort. Functionally I find this has driven me towards a very devcontainer-centric setup. Of course in theory Nix can do better, but in practice I’ve found the combo Bazzite offers, not to mention the excellent hardware support, hits the sweet spot for me.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- alberth 1mo agoCan someone explain the ramifications of this to those of us not informed. I’m in the process of about to deploy Nixos to server workloads, but am now hesitant because I don’t understand these ramifications.
- whateveracct 1mo agothe thing being disbanded is less than a year old
- toshinoriyagi 1mo agoThis was a governance structure that began ~1 year ago. Nix is 23 years old, so it won't be dying or going away due to this. But it is sad to see two extremely valuable contributors leave the project due to burn out. Nix and NixOS are two of the most revolutionary pieces of software in my experience. Hopefully Nix finds a governance structure worth of it.
- Alien1Being 1mo agoIf you want to trust your servers to a product of this community, that is your call. Just note that the community is unstable and prone to civil wars.
- vasco 1mo agoEven just reading this has more bureaucracy than at a company with hundreds of people. Holy hell some projects turned open source into committees and committees to decide what committees are needed.
- jonringer117 1mo agoNix ran for many years with very little to no structure. This worked fine as long as the community has some cohesion around it being a FOSS project. But political divisiveness happened around 2021 and crept into the community. You're still seeing the fallout of https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/pull/98 https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/pull/98
- vehemenz 1mo agoI’m not saying it’s decisively correlated, or anything on its own, but there sure are a lot of anime avatars in this community.
- Cyph0n 1mo agoNix and NixOS probably wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the anime pfps :)
- coldbrewed 1mo agoI do not like anime but holy crap do people with anime pfps make excellent software engineers and terrifying red teamers.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- yoyohello13 1mo agoIt’s really the furries that keep the modern world running.
- sunaookami 1mo agoFurries != Weeaboos/Otakus
- yoyohello13 1mo agoLet’s me honest, the communities have a lot of overlap.
- frantathefranta 1mo ago[flagged]
- coldbrewed 1mo ago
- ronef 1mo agoFor anyone reading this and jumping to a broader conclusion: the Nixpkgs core team disbanding does not mean Nixpkgs or Nix is dying. It does mean that this particular structure was not sustainable, very important contributors burnt out and we need to do better, faster. We need to continue learning from this and continue building a stronger ecosystem that prioritizes the contributors who are the only reason any of this is possible. Personally, I'm sorry and grateful. Sorry that it ended in core folks being burnt out. Grateful since they did some of the most amazing work, more than anyone can imagine two people doing.
- Commenter1488 1mo ago[dead]
- nylonstrung 1mo ago[dead]
- throwaway260806 1mo ago> more than anyone can imagine two people doing The core team was just 2 people and they disbanded? There was also a steerco for just 2 people? I’m now even more confused.
- anglesideangle 1mo agoHere's the team's description https://nixos.org/community/teams/nixpkgs-core/ https://nixos.org/community/teams/nixpkgs-core/. They were able to accomplish quite a lot of useful work. The steering committee is a separate organization (https://nixos.org/community/teams/steering-committee/ https://nixos.org/community/teams/steering-committee/) that contains more people and arguably accomplishes less.
- zem 1mo agothere are two distinct usesn of team/committee/council/etc in the software world, though they often get conflated. one is a formal structure to help with things like coordination and governance when many people are working on something, and it does seem a little silly to have one consist of just two people. but the other usage is to create an entity, and say "this entity is responsible for so and so problem", and humans then sign up to be part of the entity as a formal indication that they are working on this problem. and in this sense of the word it's perfectly fine for a core team to be two people, and for it to officially disband when those people no longer want to be working on the problem for whatever reason. note that they did try to recruit new people to the effort, and if they had succeeded then the "core team" entity would have provided some sort of continuity to the project despite the original people moving on.
- lrvick 1mo agoAnyone looking for a full source bootstrapped, multi-party-signed, container native, and deterministic alternative to nix, check out https://stagex.tools https://stagex.tools https://codeberg.org/stagex/stagex https://codeberg.org/stagex/stagex
- alberth 1mo agoIsn’t this an apples/oranges comparison. Nix/NixOS is fundamentally about a declarative system configuration. And as far as I understand, StageX doesn’t have that.
- lrvick 1mo agoYou can define an immutable, deterministic, and bootable system image for anything from an enclave to a laptop with just the primitives provided by the OCI Containerfile standard. A stagex containerfile can define a system build recipe in such a way that several competing build systems that obey the same standard can all get the same hashes, which we sign every release.
- alberth 1mo agoJust to confirm my understanding, is the following corrects? NixOS: “Given this configuration, build me the same system again.” StageX: “Prove that every binary in this system came from the source code I think it did.” Because aren’t these two very different things.
- yjftsjthsd-h 1mo agoDifferent angles, same problem. Nix should deterministically take the same pinned inputs and produce the same output, which is also a solution to "Prove that every binary in this system came from the source code I think it did." (since that source code is one of the inputs that's pinned)
- lrvick 1mo agoBoth statements are valid for StageX
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- andersonpico 1mo agoAll the posts about nix always go something like: 1. the "I used nix once/some time ago but I realized it's stupid/hard/whatever" 2. anime pfps/furries/trans/woke are bad 3. complaining about CoC/governance/etc Irrespective of whatever the posted article is about relating to this technology. This is one of those threads. Nix seems to have one of the worst discussion quality around here. Rust threads are similar (though they got better recently), specially on the negative unrelated comments side, but seem to have much more engaged people. Maybe Anubis has a similar ratio. I wonder why?
- elliotec 1mo agoYou're not helping though. If you want that to be different, focus on different things rather than bringing attention to what you're complaining about.
- andersonpico 1mo agoWhy though? I didn't see it mentioned yet and maybe there are valid reasons for that happening that I'm not aware of. Also, discussing the thread in itself seems more relevant than how hard/confusing/woke you find a language. I'm not here making a call to action or trying to police the thread, if anyone want to go off topic be guest.
- SpecialistK 1mo agoThere's an old adage, but without being in the Nix scene I don't know how applicable it is: "If everywhere you go smells like dog poo, look at your own shoes."
- Eueudhsbsj32 1mo agoHopefully a new governance structure will emerge and allow for a better path forward. As a layman who has only used AI to package a couple things on NixOS for personal use, I would think that LLM agents are perfect for taking over most of the nixpkgs workflow.
- garn810 1mo agoAh, yearly I hate/love nix post.. I tell you what. Ever since I migrated my dev workflow to nix package manager (and home manager for system depa), my life became simpler like 10 times I can configure any macos machine in like 20 mins (I use Determinate)
- Brian_K_White 1mo ago[flagged]
- Alien1Being 1mo ago[dead]
- Alien1Being 1mo agoSounds like our decision to avoid Nix was wise in retrospect...
- setheron 1mo agoI dunno about all this hullabaloo. I'm at https://nix.vegas/ https://nix.vegas/ having fun and using Nix. https://imgflip.com/i/aye90c https://imgflip.com/i/aye90c
- darkwater 1mo agoSo, looks like that being a good manager and serving it is no that easy for a good engineer in the end. (I'm not snarking at Nixpkgs core team, just at the many HN readers there that hate engineering managers in general just because they had some bad experience personally)
- eska 1mo agoVery telling that you think it’s comparable. An engineering manager doesn’t manage a random bunch of international people, but a smaller group of (company culturally) vetted people.
- icase 1mo agolol i can’t wait to hear the lunduke show about this one
- greenhat76 1mo agoLunduke still has an audience? Lol dude is a washed up loser.
- shevy-java 1mo agoLet's not sugarcoat it too much: NixOS is dying. Also, we see censorship running supreme again: "This post was flagged by the community and is temporarily hidden" People need to stop censoring everything, seriously. NixOS going downwards also coincides with the rise of AI. AI slop really puts stress onto so many projects now.
- xarwex 1mo agoI doubt this ecosystem is dying, I am pretty sure it has reached the critical mass of software where enough things depend on it that if it is to die out it needs to be replaced by something way better. Some technology is here to stay for better or for worse (Java won't die no matter how hard I'd want it to). Also nix is one of a better languages when it comes to ai, since invalid programs just don't really run. As long as I dislike the slop aspect of ai, I can trust it to do things to my nixos system without my system breaking, which I'd never even imagine on any other os. I believe that it may be one of a few languages that will benefit from clankers, since the barrier of entry is so high, you can use it as a very reliable crutch.
- looperhacks 1mo agoSorry guys, it's my fault. Every time I try to get into nix, there's a new community meltdown. I just installed NixOS yesterday ...
- imadierich 1mo ago[dead]
- 12345hn6789 1mo agoGave up participating in the community once Jon Ringer was banned / the drama. Pretty much revealed how political the community is. Ironically I think the better a tool solves a problem the more radical the community gets. We don't have to bicker over how to solve the problem and thus people find another avenue. Anyways the writing was on the wall for this and Nix is dying.