Documentation has always been a sore point for Nix, and the 2022 community survey results clearly show demand for improvement.
Documentation, Documentation, Documentation
Documentation (once again) came up universally across almost all
respondents. Key asks in this area revolved around three aspects -
onboarding, unblocking and centralization.
After talking to many people in the past two months, collecting ideas, evidence, and experience reports, I am more than pleased to announce the Nix documentation team.
Motivation
To finally improve the state of affairs with Nix onboarding and documentation, we have to tackle some big issues and work through many small ones: implement structural changes after gathering the necessary social support; fix numerous little problems and help people get their contributions merged.
It appears that, so far, no one really had the time or resources required to do this consistently. The team is built around that limitation, and therefore organized as a praxicracy: you are in charge if and only if you get the work done. The team’s reason to exist is to make that principle discoverable and reproducible by laying groundwork and setting examples.
Goals
- ease Nix learning, increase onboarding success and user retention
- improve organization of Nix knowledge
- lead, guide, and support community efforts
Initial members
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Valentin Gagarin (@fricklerhandwerk) (lead until 2022-10-31)
Nix documentarian, Tweag
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Domen Kožar (@domenkozar)
-
Jörg Thalheim (@Mic92)
NixOS Wiki maintainer
Funding
This effort is sponsored by Tweag. @fricklerhandwerk will dedicate at least 15h/w until at least 2022-10-31 towards improving Nix documentation.
Meeting notes
We will post meeting notes and updates in the Discourse Documentation category.
Team information
Up-to-date team information can be found on NixOS/nix.dev/maintainers.
