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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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open letter to the NixOS foundation (save-nix-together.org)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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https://chaos.social/@ktemkin/112310528803928457

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

We have heard from multiple people in multiple unrelated contexts that they are hoping for a hard fork of the entire community over the continued inaction on the toxic culture in the Nix project.

Oh yes, please. My experiences on the nix community forums and matrix have been soured by the actions of high-level contributors. They are simply unable to view things from another perspective and harshly defend their perceived territory. I accept that they make mistakes as we are all human, but they are aware of their positions of power and happily take advantage of it.

My major problem has been the documentation of the project and how top contributors are unable to accept how bad it is. Discussions about improvements and attempts at improving it at regularly shut down or impeded. Coming back to the "harsh defense of perceived territory", it distinctly feels like existing teams are supposed to be the only ones making changes to the things they own. Contributions from "outsiders" never exit nix review hell and are nitpicked to death.

A hard fork doesn't guarantee existing problems won't be copy-pasted into a new community (humans be humans), but at least if a new one started there'd be an attempt at resolving existing problems.

(no, I'm not xz'ist - this is a real person with a real opinion)

Edit: I realise I don't have the same issues as described in this open letter which seems to be focused on Eelco. There have been no interactions with the dude, so I can't judge, but interactions with some high-level nix members haven't been pleasant.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

My major problem has been the documentation of the project and how top contributors are unable to accept how bad it is. Discussions about improvements and attempts at improving it at regularly shut down or impeded. Coming back to the “harsh defense of perceived territory”, it distinctly feels like existing teams are supposed to be the only ones making changes to the things they own. Contributions from “outsiders” never exit nix review hell and are nitpicked to death.

I made a one time contribution to the nix docs, I also got the impression that managing documentation could be better but it did got accepted after a few changes.

With that said there are alternative projects that provide a form of documentation to nix.

[+] [email protected] -2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, I enjoy hitting F3 twelve times to find the beginning of mkDerivation documentation - silly me, I must've known to search for "stdenv" documentation. Or having to find the source-code of makeWrapper because the documentation for it is mostly in the make-wrapper.sh. Or trying to find a lib function in the unsorted list of library functions.

But why is reference documentation in the "manual" anyway and loaded as a single html? The configuration options are also one humongous html, but separated from the manual. So it is possible to separate the manual, but it hasn't been done for some reason.
Python uses sphinx or mkdocs, rust uses cargo doc, and C/C++ (+ other languages) use doxygen, and they generate multi page, static, documentation with quite reasonable search, but for some reason nix went the single document way requiring Ctrl+F.

It is slowly getting better, but I find external sources to often be much better than the manuals.

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