rfcs VS nix

You may consider this view biased, but we have this: https://srid.ca/nixos-mod

* September 2023: The "Nix Community Survey 2023" is looking for gender data, and the mods don't like that most contributors are men.

* November 2023: The moderation team tries to institute a Code of Conduct https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/pull/114 ... and they get their way

* November 2023: Some are not happy about it: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/moderation-team-accountability... -- the moderators talk about their "authority" and of course lock and hide the thread. It's "disruptive" and "off-topic", you see.

* This sort of activity continues -- moderators consolidating and increasing their power, citing how they need the power to control "concern trolls" and such -- and now in April 2024, we get https://save-nix-together.org/

The "anonymous contributors" want to drive out the NixOS founder entirely, so that _they_ are in charge. They want "to hold people accountable for bad behaviour at all levels" and lament having "responsibility without authority" - in other words, they want power, power, power. They want power over everyone. Their justification is that they believe they have the moral high ground, and they deserve to lord it over everyone else.

Hold onto that hard power, Eelco, and tell this lot to fork the project. Let's see how they enjoy moderating noxious.org instead of nixos.org

https://old.reddit.com/r/NixOS/comments/1ceiz36/thoughts_on_...

And the RFC to improve the situation:

https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/pull/175

> (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.

> https://github.com/NixOS/nix/pull/9911#issuecomment-19252073...

As we covered in my last post, NixOS is a amazing Linux distribution for creating stable and declared environments. Now while this is amazing for a desktop setup, it is also perfect for a home-server or home-lab.

(Nix itself is slowly chugging along with Windows via MinGW - https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nix-on-windows/1113/108 and https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/1320 , for example.)

Nix is a cross-platform package manager. It uses the nix programming language. Nix and NixOs are often used in the same context, but while the first is a package manager, the latter is a linux distribution based on nix.

Today I want to talk to you about Nixos. What is it? Nixos is a declarative and reproducible OS, partly taking the words used on their own page. What does that mean?

Software developers often want to customize:

1. their home environments: for packages (some reach for brew on MacOS) and configurations (dotfiles, and some reach for stow).

2. their development shells: for build dependencies (compilers, SDKs, libraries), tools (LSP, linters, formatters, debuggers), and services (runtime, database). Some reach for devcontainers here.

3. or even their operating systems: for development, for CI, for deployment, or for personal use.

Nix provision all of the above in the same language, with Nixpkgs, NixOS, home-manager, and devShells such as https://devenv.sh/. What's more, Nix is (https://nixos.org/):

- reproducible: what works on your dev machine also works in CI in prod,

- declarative: you version control and review your configurations and infrastructure as code, at a reasonable level of abstraction,

- reliable: all changes are atomic with easy roll back.

Hopping from one distro to another with a different package manager might require some time to adapt. Using a package manager that can be installed on most distro is one way to help you get to work faster. Flatpak is one of them; other alternative are Snap, Nix or Homebrew. Flatpak is a good starter, and if you have a bunch of free time, I suggest trying Nix.

- it reduces bloat, because you can generate an environment or OS image with only the software needed to run a specific program or service

My guess is that a big efficiency gain would come from the second point, because you don't waste CPU on code that you don't use.

Does this make sense? Has anyone explored this?

[0]: https://nixos.org

1) Setting up the development environment - I currently use devcontainers for most things, but may also dig into nix -> isolated, portable, repeatable development environment 2) Exploring Echo - understand routing, requests, response, etc. 3) Incorporate Templ - integration with Echo, template composition, etc. 4) Integrating TailwindCSS - config for use with Echo/Templ, development cycle, deployment, etc. 5) Add in HTMX - endpoints, template structure, concepts, etc. 6) hyperscript for interactivity - client side interactivity