The reception on the nixos discourse is worth a look: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/introducing-flakehub/32044
I’m sorry some folks aren’t excited about FlakeHub, but that is okay. We’ve made it because it solves real problems we’ve experienced, and I think it is going to make a big difference in the community. We’re all contributing to the project in the ways we want to, and this is an example of that.
We see flakes as the future of Nix, and we’re unabashedly working to make that true. One way we’re doing that is using flakes extensively every day and exposing ourselves to the bugs, papercuts, and pain points. We often deeply research and resolve these problems upstream, without fanfare or posting on Discourse.
I think we have the common goal of growing and improving Nix, and we’re glad to be doing it together. We would love to see a continuation of RFC-144 accepted into Nix upstream. The version resolving feature of FlakeHub is a bandaid that works until the upstream project has a comparable feature. In my opinion, it is a good thing to do experiments like this without committing the entire project to it.
Something I've noticed: `nixos/*` and `home-manager/*` are incompatible (home-manager expects 23.11 while nixos is 23.05).
You can get nixpkgs unstable like this:
nixpkgs-unstable.url = "https://flakehub.com/f/NixOS/nixpkgs/1.*.tar.gz"; I am very disappointed. Instead of focusing on actually fixing problems with Flakes and trying to stabilize them, DetSys goes full in on experimental Flakes, advertising them as the future, ignoring all problems with them and building products on top of them. Meanwhile everybody trying to help out official efforts, the Nix team, Nixpkgs maintainers, the documentation team and more are suffering because Flakes isn’t stable. It seems like DetSys has no interest in alleviating the pressure and bridging the gap that Flakes has created in the community.
And more concretely, it’s a well-known problem that Flakes suffer from an explosion of dependencies 64 with little reuse and interoperability. The design of how dependencies are locked just isn’t right. But oh surprise, that’s exactly what FlakeHub seems to help with by adding an ad-hoc third-party versioning scheme on top of Flakes. And all that centralised (wasn’t the whole point of Flakes to not be centralised?), proprietary and with seemingly no intention of upstreaming it in any way.
This all just doesn’t sit right with me :frowning:
Oh, and it has 50 likes, lol
This comment on Discourse has a lot of likes in part because people in the community recognize his username from his contributions even if they haven't worked with him.
He's not some random passerby throwing out an opinion about a project he has no stake in. He's a longtime, highly active contributor in the Nix ecosystem who cares about projects he's involved in and other efforts related to them.
You don't have to agree with his take but this is disrespectful and lame.
edolstra isn’t some rando either, he’s behind (if I understand correctly) the original Nix paper all the way back in 2004: https://edolstra.github.io/pubs/nspfssd-lisa2004-final.pdf
I think all you're missing is my point. ;)
My point is not that it's automatically a huge deal whether Infinisil (or anyone) disapproves of this or that development in the community. But that nobody deserves to be dismissed with a backhanded I-hope-my-attempt-to-discredit-you-doesn't-discredit-you 'go touch grass' comment. And that I think within the Nix(OS) community there's basic neighborly recognition that is clearly missing here (on HN).
Totally agree that “go touch grass” is a disrespectful take.
These are a bunch of O.G. hackers who’ve invested a portion of their life into a significantly underfunded problem statement in our industry.
They deserve respect and our industry is better for them spending their time the way they did.
I’m personally very thankful these folks exist and are as passionate as they are. It gives me hope that one day I’ll work with a package manager in production that does more than just YOLO unpack an archive file into a global namespace followed by some hopefully deterministic shell scripts.
> people in the community recognize his username from his contributions
> He's a longtime, highly active contributor in the Nix ecosystem who cares about projects he's involved in and other efforts related to them.
> You don't have to agree with his take but this is disrespectful and lame.
Without doubling down on my viewpoint that you already think is lame and disrespectful, you don't think any of these achievements are probably mildly unhealthy/obsession level?
That said, a lot of people in the Nix community go above and beyond what could reasonably be asked of them by others, and it probably does put them at risk of problems including burnout. I'd be interested in research into emotional well-being and F/OSS involvement in general, because it could be really valuable in informing strategies for building F/OSS sustainably and even personal advice for staying balanced.
At the individual level, though, concern about this kind of thing is best left to people who don't need to look at metrics related to VCS activity to tell if someone is taking a hobby (or job) too far— trusted, close relations: family members, old friends, life partners, dear neighbors, etc.
Can we reasonably assume that somebody who pours themselves into open-source to the point of being visibly emotionally upset over the fact that somebody else made a package/service that goes in a direction you don't agree with most likely means you're sacrificing time otherwise spent in exactly what you mentioned: maintaining/having relationships with family members, old friends, life partners, etc.
How can you maintain a healthy social life + fitness life + professional career life if the bulk of your free time is spent caring so passionately about open source you're willing to argue/dedicate a ton of your free time to it?
I'm willing to bet people who operate at this level don't take care of themselves in at least one other area, whether it be non-PC-related relationships, fitness, social life, etc.
I also want to mention that I usually don't argue much about issues. Most of my time is spent on making concrete improvements to the ecosystem :)
You are right, done.