Attendees: @lucperkins @infinisil @henrik-ch @wrover (later: @fricklerhandwerk)
-
Ilia introduces himself and mentions his ambition to write a Nix book.
- motivation: many devs try to read lots of things, but end up in the chat helpless
- also they spend waiting hours on compiling the world due to misconceptions
- verbal introduction is much more effective, but that doesn’t scale
- suspcicion: many companies are forced to come up with their own solution to different problems
- @fricklerhandwerk: there is evidence supporting this
- General overview with a practical emphasis
- has funding from his company
- wants to make it public soonish, ~ 1 month
- Open to collaboration
- what is the focus?
- core Nix concepts
- Haskell, haskell.nix, third-party projects in the ecosystem
- More for Haskell people
- should cover all aspects
- motivation: many devs try to read lots of things, but end up in the chat helpless
-
Who else is working on a Nix book?
-
@jonringer @nrdxp
- GitHub - divnix/nix-book: The Nix Package Manager
- some partial chapters
-
@fricklerhandwerk
- GitHub - NixOS/nix-book: Nix documentation – centralized community online learning resource for Nix
- only a stub, has a fairly complete outline
-
@fricklerhandwerk: we can reasonably estimate the whole thing to take 1.5-2 years by two people working consistently
- evidence: the Rust book, various Haskell books
- ideally one deeply involved in Nix and tech, one beginner
-
@jonringer @nrdxp
-
consensus:
- get together to work on one effort
- we already have an official repository with preliminary work done, and the general idea is approved by @edolstra
- collect requirements
- draft an outline
- gather existing material
- do gap analysis
- see how to continue from there
- get together to work on one effort
-
New flake template: Provide initial flake plus README by lucperkins · Pull Request #1 · nix-dot-dev/nix-flake-example · GitHub. Ready to merge?
-
Other templates for nix.dev?
- Non-flake template?
- Get prominent people from the community to contribute templates
-
@infinisil: Write in nix.dev template section that everbody is encourgaed to submit templates (instruction, etc.)
- Inform people of this possibility
-
Team meeting time
- Current time doesn’t work for Domen
- Mic92: You're invited to talk on Matrix
-
Next topics for the docs team
- Markdown transition
- @infinisil: this is worthwhile because when we succeed it would make contributions a lot easier
-
@lucperkins: In principle it’d be good to have a unified toolchain
- have to collect requirements
- invite all people involved in the multiple ongoing efforts
-
@lucperkins will write an invitation
- when2meet.com from 2 weeks to 4 weeks ahead
- observation: there is an infrastructure and an editorial side to documentation, mostly orthogonal problems
-
@fricklerhandwerk: have to work on both, do we have the resources to do it in parallel?
- editorial problem: need tutorials and guides, but it’s really tedious to write them when reference documentation is inadequate
- @Ericson2314 suggested to fix the reference first, then the rest will come much more easily
- we need all four Diataxis types
- simplified: bottom-up (principles, interfaces) and top-down (use cases, skills)
- (general agreement)
-
@fricklerhandwerk: have to work on both, do we have the resources to do it in parallel?
- Markdown transition