The SC's role in the disbandment of the Nixpkgs core team

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As a moment of high-level reflection…

Given the complaints by some of the folks here, I can’t help but notice that things were maybe better (or at least no worse) under Eelco. An alternate history without the revolt would have flakes stabilized (as seen by Detsys’ actions in this timeline, and evidently as desired by cafkafc).

One can’t help but be sadly amused by this, right? It feels like a lot of the things complained about under the previous regime (technically two regimes ago? kinda?) and used as a casus belli to kick it out are still going on. We still complain of gridlock, we still have no decision on flakes, we still are mad about moderation (albeit to a lesser extent, given that the automod seems to basically work), we still are upset about sponsorships, we still complain about transparency…we’ve gone through all this, banned people, insulted people, hurt people, and we’ve ended up in many ways back where we started.

An old joke: “the common element in all of your failed relationships isn’t the other person”. Maybe the problem lies in the community rather than any specific implementation of governance?

To have good governance you must first be governable.

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Automod?! Excuse me, I am still personally making people mad on the regular.

(Wink, tongue-in-cheek, etc. The mission is not to make people mad; sometimes I fail at the mission. Fine print only included in order to hold myself to an exceptionally high standard for clarity in communication.)

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What year your alternate history splits from reality? 2018?

An alternate history departing in 2023 and having every team try to go business as usual obviously would not have flakes stable by now.

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“The police are not here to create disorder, the police are here to preserve disorder”, etc. etc. :laughing:

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What DetSys has done for nix is mostly positive, but leaning into flakes as a business model was a mistake IMO. Flakes are fundamentally broken, and nix needs to be worked at from the language and tooling level to evolve in the right direction. People use flakes because of the convenience the tooling adds, but it’s still experimental because of the many problems it introduced. DetSys stabilized them, but that doesn’t mean they solved the problem, they just addressed an issue with their business, since much of it relies on flakes being the de-facto way to use nix.

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That’s the typical conservative criticism of any attempts of improving things somewhat.

Building completely new systems and processes is an extremely difficult task and this is made much more difficult if there was no proper governance or established processes before.

This is true even if you don’t care for democracy and transparency, just easier hidden in autocratic systems.

You have no reason to claim that things would have been better somehow had nobody tried to change anything, but as always simply state your opinion as fact.

What, do you think, would Eelco have done in that alternative reality? What and who prevents him from doing that now?

We still complain of gridlock, we still have no decision on flakes, we still are mad about moderation (albeit to a lesser extent, given that the automod seems to basically work), we still are upset about sponsorships, we still complain about transparency…

Is this just an attempt to rile things up even more? All of these things were individually discussed, a lot. Reducing them to just a vague list of unsolved problems doesn’t do anybody justice.

Especially as some of them are directly caused by people you seem to align with.

An old joke: “the common element in all of your failed relationships isn’t the other person”. Maybe the problem lies in the community rather than any specific implementation of governance?

What is this, a 19th century monarchist complaining about all those pesky revolutions the rabble forced on them? The king was fine, it is the people that were unruly and thankless?

“The community” is not a person with one personality and one set of beliefs and wants.

To have good governance you must first be governable.

What is that even supposed to mean. It’s a nothing-sentence.

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It’s finger-wagging from an overall non-participant in the community (other than commenting on drama posts). Obviously that doesn’t advance our community as a whole. Also, I’ve never heard of the SC having anything to do with “governing” people anyway.

These threads do attract some level of point-and-laugh type attention, but I personally can say I appreciate the reasonable level of transparency and knowing what hasn’t worked in the past, so hopefully we can come up with something better in the future.

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PSA: Please do not be governable.

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My guy, I maintain packages, I was lead on the Nix Vegas CTF (blog post and code drop soon on the first Nix CTF), I’ve shipped and shared software here to do analysis of the repos (see my nix-facts post), I’ve got merged PRs on the homepage, and I ran for the SC last year. Quit lying.

Like, this is why a lot of folks don’t like it here–in adult open-source, we don’t go making up lies and ignoring real contributions from members just because we don’t like them.

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It’s no secret that you’ve always been absurdly more engaged in polarizing discussions like this than any part of the community that is of technical value. Your nixpkgs contributions are 90% simple lmstudio version bumps (42 out of 50 PRs), which is an odd place to derive such a high horse position from.

If you want to put it into perspective, my update bot arguably has contributed more to nixpkgs than you did (same quality of contributions but at least at a higher quantity).

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84%* :slight_smile: but anyway, my main point wasn’t a simple jab but rather pointing out that the rhetoric isn’t worth engaging with, since (as I’ve seen in other social communities even outside of tech) the worst, ragebaitiest* comments tends to come from people invested more in watching people become miserable than in the health of the community. Ignoring such distractions will do our community good, I think, given the innumerable challenges the community already faces.

*and to be clear, insulting the majority of the community is flamebait/ragebait. DFTT.

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