Parting from the documentation team

[domenkozar]

@grahamc

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.

This was an oversight on my side, my point was that his contributions were about removing things you didn’t like and not contributing anything meaningful.

@grahamc

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.

This directly contradicts your own and only contribution of nix magic cache to nix.dev and statements made in the PR at the time. However the wind blows given the interests, the words speak.

@grahamc

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

I have to say this is the final straw for me, belittling my contributions of starting nix.dev and donating it to the community seems to be measured by the number of commits.

I have written many tutorials that are part of nix.dev today, some of which like cross compilation took a week of researching and talking to different community members to write a single commit. I surely hope you don’t measure your employees productivity based on commits.

On top of that the time during Valenting was leading documentation team, I spent time transferring the knowledge to him and brainstorming with him on where to take the project.

What’s your point here though, that I haven’t done enough?

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:

1. 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.
2. 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!)

I have stated at the NixOS foundation meetings many times to transfer the domain and repository to the foundation with no strings attached. Eelco Dolstra was the chair of the foundation at the time and Luc Perkins was leading the documentation team. If you wanted to do that you’d do it instead of making your own site in secret. Later on when zimbatm joined the board the did take care of it and “my” things were removed a few days later.

Maybe you should have stated what bothers you 2 years ago, although given that I have said I am donating everything to the foundation we both know these are not the real reasons.

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.

I find this all extremely dishonest although well-versed - It’s not how I’m willing to spend my time on earth, I’m no longer willing to interact with you again.

Domen