Having every package as part of a distribution is immensely useful. You can declaratively define your whole system with all software. I can roll out a desktop, development VM or server within 5 minutes and it’s fully configured.
Yeah, because they allow anyone to contribute with little oversight. As Lance Vick wrote[1], "Nixpkgs is the NPM of Linux." And Solène Rapenne wrote[2], "It is quite easy to get nixpkgs commit access, a supply chain attack would be easy to achieve in my opinion: there are so many commits done that it is impossible for a trustable group to review everything, and there are too many contributors to be sure they are all trustable."
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34105784
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20240429013622/https://dataswamp...
Of course, Debian developers/maintainers are vetted more. But an intentional compromise in nixpkgs would be much more visible than in Debian, NPM, PyPI or crates.io.
There is currently a gazillion forks, some being forks of forks because they weren't considered culturally pure enough for the culturally purged fork.
Hopefully Determinate Systems or Ekela can get some real maturity and corporate funding into the system and pull the whole thing out of the quagmire.
This can't be real. Are you sure it was something innocuous and not something bigoted?
https://discourse.nixos.org/t/breaking-doge-to-recommend-nix...
Same author quoted the original text on their Reddit thread and was mostly uncriticized there:
https://old.reddit.com/r/NixOS/comments/1joshae/breaking_dog...
I personally found it incredibly distasteful and also fairly representative of the quality of conversation you often get from some of the Nix community. I'm not offensive, you're just thin skinned, can't you take a joke, etc. is extremely common. You'll have to judge for yourself whether it's bigoted or dog whistle or neither.
I'm a former casual community member with modest open source work in that ecosystem (projects and handful of nixpkgs PRs) before I left permanently last spring. I no longer endorse its use for any purpose and I seek to replace every piece of it that I was using.
I still hear about the ways they continue to royally fuck up their governance and make negligible progress on detoxifying the culture. It took them until last fucking week to ban Anduril from making hiring posts on the same official forum.
>I personally found it incredibly distasteful
How? Why? It's clearly satire, written in the style of The Onion.
>and also fairly representative of the quality of conversation you often get from some of the Nix community
Good satire? At least some members aren't brainrotted out to the point of no return.
> I'm not offensive, you're just thin skinned, can't you take a joke, etc.
It's clearly not offensive and if that upset you, you clearly have thin skin and can't take the blandest of jokes. Histrionic.
>I no longer endorse its use for any purpose and I seek to replace every piece of it that I was using.
I will also tell others not to use Nix after reading that. The community is indeed too toxic.
>I still hear about the ways they continue to royally fuck up their governance and make negligible progress on detoxifying the culture.
They won't detoxify until they remove all the weak neurotic leftist activists with weird fetishes for "underrepresented minorities."
>It took them until last fucking week to ban Anduril from making hiring posts on the same official forum.
I'm not sure who that is or why it's an issue, but I assume it's something only leftists cry about.
I agree that the infighting is not nice. But to be honest, when you just use NixOS and submit PRs, you do not really notice them. It's not like people are fighting them in the actual PRs to nixpkgs.
Ironically enough the closest comparison I could make is driving a Tesla. Even if the product is great, you're supporting an organisation that is the opposite.
I think the Nix team will continue to slowly chase away competent people until the rot makes the whole thing wither, at which point everyone switches their upstream over to Determinate Systems' their open core. Although I'm hoping DS will ultimately go the RHEL-Fedora route.