rfcs VS NixOS-docker

> (after eelco ignored the PR for quite a while, also!)

Clicking that link takes us to a PR that was opened on 2024-02-02. The initial response from the Nix author comes 7 minutes later. Puck has multiple back and forths with other members Github, but her next interaction with the Nix author comes the next day on 2024-02-03. This is also the first time in the conversation where she "reminds him ... to even read her PR message". There's a second interaction later that same day during which she does similar, but it's worth noting this is pointing to a different message and appears to be less a "reminder to read" and more re-iterating what they feel is their argument against the Nix author's own arguments. Puck then continues to have back and forth with other commenters but as of today, there has been no further comments from the Nix author after 2024-02-03, and no further comments from Puck after 2024-02-08.

This hardly to my mind qualifies either as "having to remind him multiple times to even read her PR message at all" or "after eelco ignored the PR for quite a while, also!" So as I said it's a fairly weak claim, and feels more like a "bastard eating crackers" reaction to the PR than an actual showing of poor behavior.

As for the "Meson example", I didn't ignore it. As I stated in my comment, I had at that point read two of the referenced discussions in detail, and thus commented on them. I didn't comment in the "Meson example" for the simple reason that I hadn't read it.

I have read it now, and equally find it confusing.

1) The claim in the letter is that the proposal has "passed RFC, for five years", yet the RFC itself only appears to have been opened 2022-08-24. It's been a while since grade school for me, and I'll admit COVID has warped all our sense of time, but I'm pretty sure 2022 is not 5 years ago.

2) The first completed working implementation of the change doesn't appear to have been done until 2023-01-18 (https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/pull/132#issuecomment-13874661...). Again this is much less than 5 years old.

3) On 2023-03-20, the author of the PR for this change states:

> the RFC has made it past most of the early stages and the current goal is to achieve parity with the current buildsystem before replacing it.

(https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/pull/132#issuecomment-14768433...)

Again, this doesn't seem to fit at all with the claim that the proposal has "passed RFC, for five years"

4) On 2023-11-01, the Nix author themselves asks for updates on the RFC implementation, an action which doesn't seem congruent with someone who is willy nilly single handedly blocking things and being a disruption to the process. And the author of the PR states:

>the main block is actually a lack of free time for the main devs!

(https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/pull/132#issuecomment-17890770...)

This doesn't seem to point to evidence that the Nix author is single handedly holding up this process.

5) On 2024-03-21 the PR author notes:

> currently working on adding support to build nix-perl, waiting for assistance

(https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/pull/132#issuecomment-20135356...)

Not to sound like a broken record, but if the issue isn't finished as of a few weeks ago, it can hardly be considered to be held up by the Nix author for 5 years.

I agree that one of the links in the open letter is to a comment on a PR from 2019, which is indeed 5 year ago, and does indeed contain the Nix author commenting that they are skeptical of the change because "he doesn't know meson but knows his own build system". But given that there's an entire wealth of history on the topic since then, including progress on the feature that appears completely unobstructed by the Nix author and an open PR that is a mere 3 weeks old for a current implementation, I find myself again unconvinced of this rampant bad behavior on the part of the Nix author. And I reiterate again that these complaints are very weak and don't do much to support the open letter at best, and act as contrary evidence at worst.

Again there might be other context to be had that is missing, but if one is going to write a massive "open letter" complaining about bad behavior, I expect the links in that letter to point to actual bad behavior, and or provide the relevant context necessary to show how what appears to be normal dissent is a passive aggressive continuation of obstruction. I have to assume the links one provides in an open letter is their strongest evidence, and if this is all the authors have... I am unconvinced.

Nix with dynamic derivations (RFC92) could potentially beat this curse.

https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/blob/master/rfcs/0092-plan-dyn...

See: A plan to stabilize the new CLI and Flakes incrementally https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/pull/136

NixOS recently introduced "problem" infrastructure to deal with such problems more gracefully and explicitly:

https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/blob/master/rfcs/0127-issues-w...

For some more context: Flawed as they are, Flakes solve a large number of problems Nix experiences without them. This is why I, and presumably many others, use them even in their current experimental state.

An RFC was recently accepted to commit to forming a plan towards stabilization of Flakes: https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/pull/136

Personally, I don't believe there won't be any breaking changes, but I also believe that the stabilization of Flakes is still a ways away and hope that there will be a reasonable migration path.

NixOS needs to merge https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/pull/133 to solve the issue

Luckily, I did not have to start from scratch as Nix serves their own docker image. I mounted one of my directories and was able to drop into a Nix shell with my configuration file.

There is one: https://github.com/NixOS/docker

But it's more of a Nix docker image than a NixOS one, because half of the things that NixOS gives you don't really make much sense in a docker image (systemd in a container?).

I only know of the nix package manager. https://hub.docker.com/r/nixos/nix

Ability to run buildkite agents inside a kubernetes cluster on preemble instances without need to modify agent’s Dockerfile every time new dependency comes up - was one of major reasons to learn Nix. I’m just using nixos/docker image as a base, install buildkite-agent and some base stuff like bash via nix-env inside Dickerfile, everything else lays in flake.nix of every project my dockerized nixified buildkite agent run.