- Video conference
- GitHub project board
- Team details
- Past meeting notes
- Attendees: @fricklerhandwerk @asymmetric @infinisil @proofconstruction Alex @yuki_is_bored
- Notes by: @infinisil
Agenda
- updates and unblocking
- discuss a few recent issues
Notes
- no blockers
Change project's self-description by asymmetric · Pull Request #575 · NixOS/nix.dev · GitHub
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@fricklerhandwerk: Should ask more people for input
- @infinisil: Let’s ask the NixOS Foundation if they have a problem with that
- @fricklerhandwerk: Sounds good, though let’s do it later, bad timing right now
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@infinisil: Alternatively let’s just go for it?
- @fricklerhandwerk: Let’s not rush it, undoing is harder
- (talking about the issue)
- When is something officially supported?
- Could be just this list in nix.dev, but we need a process for adding/removing items
- Can be decided on a case-by-case basis
Rename IFD (import from derivation) to something more appropriate · Issue #8450 · NixOS/nix · GitHub
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Delegated from Nix maintainers: Bikeshed a new name
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@proofconstruction: Seems like it doesn’t need a special name
- @infinisil: It’s useful to be able to refer to it, e.g. IFD is disallowed in Nixpkgs
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@infinisil: A property of this in Nixpkgs is that without IFD only local files are needed to create derivations
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@fricklerhandwerk: There’s a nice diagram explaining IFD here
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Alex: Related concepts in other languages?
- @infinisil: Bazel has something like that too, dynamic actions
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Proposals
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@asymmetric: Nested evaluation?
- @proofconstruction: I like the “nested” term. Related to flakes where you push all the inputs to the front using the lockfile before starting evaluation, but instead of doing that you nest evaluation.
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@infinisil: Dynamic derivations
- @fricklerhandwerk: Not just derivations
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@infinisil: Build-dependent evaluation?
- @fricklerhandwerk: Build is not a well-defined term, only realization is defined, see also reword description of how realisation works by fricklerhandwerk · Pull Request #7592 · NixOS/nix · GitHub
- @infinisil: Store-dependent evaluation?
- @infinisil: Multi-stage evaluation?
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@asymmetric: Nested evaluation?
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@infinisil: How about opening a Discourse thread to get some bikeshedding going? I can do that
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@asymmetric: Renaming means changing it everywhere, users have to adapt
- @infinisil: Can keep the old name around (“Previously called IFD”), and in 5 years maybe 90% will be new people
Discoverability
- @proofconstruction: Generally don’t check manuals because I know they’re messy, but now the Nix and Nixpkgs manuals also look distinct visually, couldn’t recommend this.
- @fricklerhandwerk: Also currently hard to access manuals to specific versions. Related is Display versioned manuals on nixos.org by jlesquembre · Pull Request #1022 · NixOS/nixos-homepage · GitHub. Also the recent Upload manuals to releases.nixos.org again · Issue #8451 · NixOS/nix · GitHub to upload manuals to release.nixos.org again
- @infinisil: We have a lot of infrastructure questions.
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@fricklerhandwerk: Also a bit of a social problem,
nixos-homepageis barely maintained. Hard to change things. - @proofconstruction: All these manuals require indexing the entire thing to read it properly. It’s all very messy, but I might have some time to work on this.
docs: mention UID issues with login managers by scarf005 · Pull Request #8445 · NixOS/nix · GitHub
- @infinisil: Probably there are a whole bunch more such tiny notes, link to a page with all of them, e.g. guides on nix.dev with a specific tag
- @proofconstruction: Should have a NixOS option to adjust UIDs’s somewhere
- @infinisil: Could create nix.dev issue to document this and link to it from the Nix manual (as a markdown comment)
- @yuki_is_bored: nix.dev FAQ sounds appropriate, lots of such issues, easier to change the manual than the installer
- @infinisil: We need to accept whatever the installer does and document it the best way
- @fricklerhandwerk: Nothing particularly wrong with solving that problem, but I wouldn’t merge it myself. Such issues will keep coming up
- @proofconstruction: Manual shouldn’t be an issue list, should only have the happy path
- @yuki_is_bored: Depends on system what trouble you run into. Impossible to cover everything
- @proofconstruction: Definitely better to put this is nix.dev
Information architecture
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@fricklerhandwerk: Raises the question on how to name what’s currently FAQ, because they’re not all frequently asked questions, but rather (somewhat) common issues
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@infinisil: Is it all common issues? We should maybe have one FAQ and one for common issues
- agreement
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@fricklerhandwerk: Should migrate some of FAQ - NixOS Wiki
- @proofconstructor: Some of these things are just “It’s not a problem, it’s part of the design”
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Alex: Will take some time to explore nix.dev and the various manuals, could map manuals to each other
- @fricklerhandwerk: Similar to an architecture diagram of the ecosystem we created in the workshop 2 weekends ago, will publish report soon
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@infinisil: There’s already https://github.com/NixOS/nix.dev/blob/181fdc6cedb951f1c9b39e8ec2d993e3c50bcec5/maintainers/working_groups/learning_journey/documentation-survey.md, might be better to work on just churning through the old material and migrating to nix.dev
- agreement
Improve landing page by yukiisbored · Pull Request #584 · NixOS/nix.dev · GitHub
- reviewed together, merged