I started a PR here WIP: Document the design of Nix by Ericson2314 · Pull Request #4280 · NixOS/nix · GitHub . As @edolstra rightly points out, we can take material from his thesis for this. Would be nice to find a way to make writing this manual chapter a group effort!
Afterwards, I’m hoping that complex things, like the remainder of CA derivations, can be “waterfall-ed” a bit better by writing a design doc as a diff against this chapter.
Great I will also take a look thank you for starting this.
This is somewhat in the same vein as the nix pills.
In fact reimaginaing the nix pills might be worth a brainstorm too.
I basically did a bate-and-switch before, starting this and then not touching it, but I just did a few edits in response to feedback, and adding a little bit of new material.
I would strongly encourage others to send PRs against this! It will take a group effort to finish it!
OK, we pushed the current state of the PR to https://github.com/nix-community/nix/tree/doc-what-is-nix!
@fricklerhandwer and I can review PRs against the branch there, to make this more of a community effort! When specific bits seemed polish, we can also PR those upstream. Hope we can increase bandwidth this way!
https://github.com/NixOS/nix/pull/6420 is fresh PR from the commmunity-nix fork’s branch I linked above.
We don’t plan to merge everything all at once, instead upstreaming individual sections as they are ready. But it is still nice to have something to track the “big picture”, outlining and stubbing out unfinished sections as needed.
(I also pushed some new change.)