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 inadequate. Anthropologically speaking, we should be doing this nearly every day.
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)
anyways, i hope there’s a path to some kind of redemption and reconciliation in the future for the community. it sounds like it’s been Bad for years at this point.
Nix governance: still hasn't resolved dependency hell for humans apparently.
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.
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.
It seemed to me that it was all the friction of immutability without any of the benefits of reproducibility.
I never considered Nix since Portage and additional package managers like RPM installed by Portage have met my needs, but if I had considered Nix and I heard some of these words used, I probably would have walked away on that alone. Sounds like financial or political marketing.
I’m in the process of about to deploy Nixos to server workloads, but am now hesitant because I don’t understand these ramifications.
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.
In my mind, Nix was unstoppable, and I particularly loved how empowered I imagined developers would feel. No mystery-meat CI scripts pushing packages to distant infrastructure that no one understands or even has the permissions to interact with, just the entire build system in one repo, trivially cloneable and hackable... add patches or build steps to anything and it's the same build as always, build it locally or send it to Hydra, it doesn't matter.
A devs "got" it and did leverage those things, used PRs to do safe evaluation of bumps to core dependencies, but I think on the whole it was regarded as cool but not tractable, and a few years after leaving, it sounds like plans are being laid to replace it all with something containers or whatever.
Very frustrating, particularly in a world where it should be trivial to identify the 5-10 typical tasks that people want to do with the nix code, and set up Claude skills to handle those. Given how easy and self-contained the build-test loop is, it feels like an almost perfect fit for agent-led development.
internetguy•1h ago
threethirtytwo•1h ago
anglesideangle•59m ago