I mean, yes, it would probably be badly received if you announced that you (DetSys, employer of one of the lead Nix developers) are shipping to your users a forked version of Nix with features developed with no involvement of other Nix developers. It would probably be significantly more honest considering your employer’s behavior, but I can’t disagree that it would be badly received, this thread is sufficient evidence of it.
Yes, of course. In fact I don’t think anyone suggested you should do that! I’m happy we’re in agreement on this, I feel like this doesn’t happen too often.
Now you’re just making problems up, or more precisely since you can’t even imagine how there would be a problem you’re making up a nebulous “existence of problems”.
I don’t think it’s controversial to say that if this feature was developed as “an issue is opened on the upstream tracker attempting to collect feedback on JSON logging in Nix, and DetSys documented their proposed use case there, other parties could contribute to the design if they wanted to, and then a pull request was opened on the main Nix repo” nobody would be calling this “DetSys is developing and releasing features in their fork first”. Am I crazy for thinking that this is how things should work in an “upstream first” relationship like has been so often claimed by DetSys?
In fact this approach is pretty much exactly what you yourself announced in the 3.0 release article this thread is originally about!
while we maintain compatibility with the broader Nix ecosystem and actively contribute our improvements to upstream Nix, where the community ultimately determines their inclusion
Doesn’t sound like the community ultimately determined much here.
I think bme said it best: I don’t think anyone really has a problem with DetSys maintaining a fork of Nix, you’re fully allowed to do so after all. But that’s incompatible with also making claims that you’re working upstream first and that you’re just “a downstream distribution of Nix”. And that’s important because there’s really no discussion that can be had about the governance issues (for example: a Nix project lead being also involved in leading development on a competing fork of the project) when even basic facts about the truth of DetSys’s upstream work model are misrepresented. Or maybe it’s not a misrepresentation and you just fail at upholding the standards you’re aiming for - in which case a respectful answer would probably be to say “yes, this should have been developed upstream first and we didn’t [for various reasons], we try to avoid this”.
It also, to me personally, feels very cowardly to see your company try so hard to convince the community that their fork isn’t one, while you at the same time just last week were spending your time criticizing other forks on other forum threads and claiming that using a fork on part of the build infra made NixOS’s infrastructure less trustworthy. You’re placing yourself as above the others when you’re really doing just the same. But hey, that’s my personal feelings here and maybe I’m misinterpreting your stated view on forks.
Finally, re:
Fair, but you somehow still had time to release these changes to the public in the meantime, which seems to indicate it’s not a lack of work time but definitely a lack of prioritization that’s involved here. I feel like I agree with you that within such a short period no-one can’t conclude you have no plans to upstream things, however I think it’s extremely obvious that this is not an upstream first model.