Introducing the "Nixpkgs Contributors" Open Collective - Empowering NixOS Growth to contributors!

[RaitoBezarius]

@rhendric

This is all important, but I’m not sure the most important need is covered by this project. The most important need in my opinion is the need for a product manager to maintain a roadmap for OfBorg and the list of OfBorg issues. The person filling this role needs to be able to see how the product is used in the community and understand the impact that various design decisions have had or are likely to have. They need to be able to authoritatively say that a proposed feature is in or out of scope for the product, so that someone reviewing the list of issues can pick one to work on and run with it without finding out after the fact that the change would not be accepted.

This community is brimming with developer talent, and maybe more money would bring even more developers to the table. But when all of those brilliant developers see a thing that could be made better, and ask each other whether it’d be okay to do, and there is nobody in a position of authority to say yes or no, all they can do is shrug at each other.

Is Lily going to be filling that role, in addition to the other important work being described here? If not, who will own the product vision for OfBorg so that developers who aren’t part of [I don’t even know what group of people to identify here, and isn’t that revealing?] can effectively contribute?

Excellent point!

In governance workshops at NixCon [1] [2] [3], we mentioned the need for strategic views in nixpkgs, not only for nixpkgs itself (its infra, etc.), but much more IMHO.

While I do not have a good answer yet for strategic decisionmaking framework in the big picture of nixpkgs (I know this is a question some folks are working on at the moment), I can answer for OfBorg specifically and more generally Nixpkgs CI.

I believe that currently OfBorg has blatant issues which have been shared in some hidden roadmap which can be derived by the trail of unmerged PRs and issues which are open for a long time and the frustration that have been expressed in development channels by active contributors.

For those, I believe we have a consensus and an idea of prioritization on how to get there, remember that it is also about unblocking and unlocking volunteer contributions.

Moving on to the question of “feature work”, I believe that the active Nixpkgs contributors will be there to drive discussion on new feature and propose whether they feel comfortable putting efforts on that, we have been there, and we have been doing that even in volunteer contexts. I believe that if money is involved, this should very slightly alter the equation, but not that much.

Also, this initiative is not a replacement to hire a contractor (which could be as well one of the “owner” / maintainer of a project, e.g. OfBorg) to drive client feature work. It focues on strategically preventing collapse of our public goods in front of uncontrolled growth (# of packages, # of users, size of cache, build capacity, etc.) which would seriously hamper the ability of volunteers to perform their work in a frictionless way.

As a result, I believe that the “product” management of the required products for Nixpkgs Contributors is already self-driven and working fine by existing active contributors, the issue is that there’s few meta awareness / meta discussion on organizing efforts on tackling those. And we do have efforts in tangible things like infrastructure (cache, build, CDN and extra services) with “roadmap” of where we want to go: Issues · NixOS/infra · GitHub and we do organize ourselves in a way to enable this work.

Maybe, put in another way, I trust that other nixpkgs active contributors who will join me in maintaining this initiative, will be able to fulfill this role, not only for OfBorg, but for many other projects we know we need help for.
And of course, I will ensure this role as long as I am administrator of this initiative, but I trust the judgement of my peers (i.e. fellow active contributors) and I am always reading the feedback of many users, like in Where did you get stuck in the Nix ecosystem? Tell me your story and this is something that has an impact on steering the strategies.

I admit that given the critical situation, some decisions are obvious I believe, maybe in 1 year, we will be in a much better place w.r.t. to contributors, and we will require “authority” to do calls, at this point, I suggest we stay on the top of this issue, and we ensure that we will be able to face it when we will come to it.

To conclude, I would say that Lily has definitely the knowledge to execute a vision of OfBorg which would benefit a lot of folks, though, I will not speak in her stead regarding her will to continue maintenance of OfBorg in one year for any reason.

If we get the right amount of money, i.e. paying someone who can actively work on OfBorg in a serious countenance, that would be a totally different story, at that time, I think we would probably make the paid person responsible for leading the product management in collaboration with other nixpkgs contributors and ensure the paid person still contribute to nixpkgs in a way that enable them to understand the strategic pain points related to that ecosystem.
I would be excited to see this scenario become reality faster than expected.

Overall, this is an interesting point for which I should probably write up inside the Open Collective description, thank you for raising it and I hope I answered your concerns.

[1] : https://pad.lassul.us/AkAziEIdRJahIKEkZCj5BA (search for “strategic”)
[2] : NixCon Governance Workshop - #9 by fricklerhandwerk (search for “strategic”)
[3] : NixCon Governance Workshop - #10 by fricklerhandwerk (search for “strategic”)