I think the contentious reception here is more of a function of Determinate System’s general reputation with the Nix community (or at least its segment here) than of the merits of FlakeHub itself.
@grahamc is correct that a comment on RFC 0144 suggested doing this as an external project before doing it as an RFC:
However, since this looks like it could be easily implemented outside of Nix, I’d strongly suggest doing so first so that everyone can judge the usefulness.
So I don’t think it’s fair to turn around and blame DS for not doing this work upstream. (Elsewhere, he said upstreaming it was an eventual goal.) Similarly, while I personally wish more effort were being put into stabilizing flakes before building even more on top of them, grahamc did say that this was a weekend project:
In the meantime, the proof of concept of FlakeHub took about a weekend to put together.
So it seems unfair to dunk on FlakeHub for representing effort not put into some other aspect of Nix or flakes. Let him who has not spent his last weekend stabilizing flakes throw the first stone, or something.
Like many long-running marital spats: it’s not that the dishes were left out, it’s what the dishes being left out represents; it’s not the proximate issue being litigated, it’s every previous unresolved issue being re-litigated with the current issue as a proxy. It’s not that FlakeHub has technical issues outside of what one would expect from a weekend project, it’s that FlakeHub (and the manner in which it was developed and announced) is another instance of a pattern of behavior from DS, and it’s that longer pattern that people are reacting to.
I’m not a marriage counselor or experienced community moderator, so I don’t have any real solutions to offer. Maybe DS should work with Nix leadership to host or sponsor a flake hackathon to implement all the unimplemented RFCs? Maybe make a blog post about which in-progress RFCs you’re shepherding? We’re not going to get along better by having this same fight all over again, that’s for sure.
It’s just tiresome.