Does Determinate Systems control Nixpkgs/NixOS(module system)? Apparently no.
So if Canonical once implied that they control Debian, and confused the Debian community with Ubuntu, as an angry Debian maintainer, would you leave the Debian community?
Eelco Dolstra has made almost no contribution to Nixpkgs in the past three or four years, except for providing reference opinions for Nix version upgrades. At the same time, Eelco Dolstra cannot control Nixpkgs in any way other than being the header of the organization. Especially now that Tvix is mostly compatible with Nixpkgs except the flake.nix lying inside.
Control of Nixpkgs, if you need to understand it that way, is currently managed by the Nixpkgs committer team. I believe this is already pointed out in CONTRIBUTION.md or other documents it links to, and you are expected to read these documents carefully before contributing.
I don’t think committers have the same qualities as the other teams we generally criticize. Our appointments are transparent to the community. Anyone can join publicly, or publicly accuse team members, and so far, I have not seen any examples where these demands have not been properly handled. Most abuses of the “commit bit”, or the right to speak, have been addressed, but if some have not, you are welcome to point them out.
The current organizational structure of NixOS Organization does need to be adjusted, and I recognize the rationality and urgency of this issue. But I beg everyone not to express disapproval against the foundation or anything by removing their own maintainer entries, or remove entries because they are tired of arguing. You’re not hurting the people you’re trying to hurt, but you’re spreading fear into a real segment of the “community”. Things don’t work this way.
I hope our joint efforts in the past will not become less qualified because of these episodes. As a committer who has just started working for a month, I have spent several hours after class and homework every day, to click on “first time contributions”, and “has package: new” label, and try to give valuable reviews and provide clues as much as possible. As a maintainer who currently maintains 63 packages, I hope that my upstream can innovate with me together, and other users can benefit from it well, instead of sending me into a panic of not knowing what to do.
Yesterday night I worriedly scrolled through almost all the relevant comments and read almost all the attached links until 5 am the morning. After waking up at 1 pm today, I spent almost the entire afternoon and evening reviewing, testing and merging, hoping these disputes will not hinder the progress of Nixpkgs.
If you are dissatisfied with the status quo, I hope you can personally participate in these discussions. If you already feel burned out, you can leave Nixpkgs temporarily and work on some other technical projects, or go to Youtube to watch some funny videos. I hope this incident is the beginning of a better community, rather than a trigger for disbandment with resentment.
Some of my words have been translated by Google Translate. While I have made manual modifications, the wording may still be inaccurate, please forgive me.