Lix: an independent variant of the Nix package manager

[RaitoBezarius]

@Ericson2314

You are acting like this was some sort of independent decision each of us is making. My whole point is that it was not.

I am sorry, I understand that you are of good will, but how to put it. This was the result of everyone’s independent decision to come to it.

My analysis (take it with a grain of salt). There are two generations of disgusted Nix contributors, the recent one – Lix. Another one from another era, containing some folks from the Tvix project. And some folks who left the project in major reason for the stewardship of the Nix project.

Let’s stop the sugarcoating, please. Almost everyone in the Nix maintenance team was aware that something was going wrong many months before the open letter or what not.

I have a vivid memory of discussing this problem at Ocean Sprint 2023, I think this was repeated, repeated, repeated at FOSDEM, NixCon NA and more.

Everyone individually didn’t feel like there was something they could do or didn’t know what to do. When they were offered constructive recommendations, their efforts were dismissed.

If you folks figured out that those were minor problems, that is for you to understand why there’s not one but two failures on that end.

@Ericson2314

I knew I was in a more privileged position the entire time! The whole point of my actions was to use my position of privilege to that to bare the brunt of the cost of reform, such that for others the cost of participating would be far less — to make things easier for those for whom everything would indeed be harder and more painful. The goal would be for my extra-pain-taking on the vanguard and their lack of privilege to cancel out until once again we are within the margin of error on “who is suffering more participating in CppNix”. That’s what solidarity is supposed to look like.

I want to heavily push back on this. You don’t have to take hits instead of others. No one asked for this and many people can collaborate in projects without having vanguards or what not.

If this is the project you are in and the project you are asking people to join, I hope you can see by yourself this is toxic, as folks are pointing this out again.

You chose to be a vanguard, I am sorry, this makes you equally responsible to perpetuate and continue this culture in your project.

The cost of reform you are talking about is something you self-imposed yourself.

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I recommend that the Nix maintenance team discuss this and come to a common statement on the matter because I am really shocked by the comments you are making.

@Ericson2314

Perhaps people knew how much I cared about more contributors getting involved without having to suffer in these ways, and decided it was still not enough.

Or perhaps I did not communicate this enough — erring on the side of the current team getting along well enough for us to feel safe involving more people — and my intent to be just one of many contributors doing “foundational clean-ups” was not known widely enough.

The former possibility doesn’t haunt me so much — I tried; they knew it; it wasn’t good enough. Oh well. The later brings me much more angst as an opportunity squandered.

I think you are mixing so many things in this comment, you are talking about a technical matter “foundational clean-ups”, you are still acting as if this was shared with, e.g. the Lix folks.

And you are talking about whether you communicated enough or whether you showed you cared enough about contributors, not suffering.

That’s still irrelevant, as Jade told you, the impacts / the consequences of what happened are still transparent and clear.

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Your projects had multiple issues that were clear and apparent to outsiders that leaked outside your team and had to become a Nixpkgs problem (as I had to become against my own will a Nix maintainer in Nixpkgs). You never acted on that, you never took the necessary actions to show that you (:= your team) know how to manage an open source project.

Each individual in that team bear a part of that failure and should diagnose why that happened and inform the community of that, in full honesty. I cannot fathom how people continued to say “Oh, you are right this is a problem in the Nix maintenance team… How could we solve that…” when some folks who were on the verge of quitting the contribution were confiding themselves to a member of that team and trying to find hope or change or something to be able to get back into contributions.