Hi Domen,
I’d like to re-state that I’m sorry you found yourself in this situation and felt you had to step down.
Our hope was that we’d all move beyond what happened here and we’d just let it slip into distant memories. Since it hasn’t, I wanted to share that I’m a bit confused about some of what you’re saying here. I think there may be some misunderstanding.
You suggested his contributions were limited to adding himself as a codeowner, and removing the starter templates. When I looked at the codeowner PR, he isn’t in there. Everything in there is setting you as the codeowner, with the exception of two lines that also include Valentin.
For the starter templates, its really a misnomer since the unmerged pull request was only removing one starter template: a link to a devenv getting-started guide. This was part of an effort the documentation team was going through to make nix.dev more of a neutral resource, and was also agreed upon by other members of the docs team.
I know for sure there were lots of discussions about making nix.dev flake-first, but the documentation team has continued to decide against it until they’re no longer experimental.
Regarding the progress stopping when Valentin’s documentation funding team ended and he stepped down, that looks like it might be simply that Valentin stopped contributing.
Looking at the data, Valentin (fricklerhandwerk) made a remarkable number of contributions:
| Author | Additions (Sum) | Deletions (Sum) | PR (Count) |
|---|---|---|---|
| fricklerhandwerk | 2,764 | 280 | 26 |
| yukiisbored | 622 | 525 | 10 |
| zupo | 289 | 165 | 3 |
| app/dependabot | 220 | 163 | 19 |
| domenkozar | 206 | 254 | 2 |
and looking at specifically these contributors (excluding dependabot), we can see that Valentin was really carrying the project:
(where the data came from)
gh pr list --repo NixOS/nix.dev --limit 1000 --state all --json additions,author,baseRefName,body,changedFiles,closed,closedAt,comments,createdAt,deletions,isDraft,labels,mergeable,mergedAt,mergedBy,milestone,number,state,title,updatedAt,url
converted into a csv:
.[] | select(.state == "MERGED") | select(.createdAt >= "2022-01-01T00:00:00Z" and .createdAt < "2023-01-01T00:00:00Z") | select(.mergedAt >= "2022-01-01T00:00:00Z" and .mergedAt < "2023-01-01T00:00:00Z") | { number: .number, additions: .additions, deletions: .deletions, author: .author.login, createdAt: .createdAt } | [.number, .additions, .deletions, .author, .createdAt ] | @csv
There are of course many questions as to why we chose to write documentation on zero-to-nix.com instead of nix.dev. A big one is answered above: we wanted to write docs for flakes, the team didn’t want them.
But that wasn’t the only reason.
While I know the intent was to support publishing a book, I was not thrilled about aspects of nix.dev at that time:
- Although you had agreed to generously donate it to the Nix community, at that time it was not yet a true community project. Contributing to nix.dev required signing a CLA — a CLA that assigned complete ownership to you, Domen, personally.
- Although ostensibly a neutral community resource, nix.dev discussed Cachix quite a bit, a proprietary product created by you, Domen, in a variety of places (for example: Continuous Integration with GitHub Actions — nix.dev documentation), and frequently it’s mentioned in a matter-of-fact way that doesn’t make it clear that it’s a proprietary service. Several references remain to this day (which I think can be fine!)
These things made me feel uncomfortable making significant contributions on behalf of Determinate Systems. It’s your prerogative, of course, to create documentation sources that promote Cachix and Devenv. But I don’t think it’s your prerogative to do so in a community resource and to actively resist making that resource more neutral (Remove Nix starter template by lucperkins · Pull Request #404 · NixOS/nix.dev · GitHub).
To be clear, I have no objection - moral or otherwise - to people and companies building documentation sites that serve what ever purpose. I just didn’t want to contribute to this one. I’m glad the CLA is gone now, and that nix.dev is a fully community resource now.
So, there you go. I thought that might be interesting or useful context for your future documentation efforts.