What would you do if you were the BDFL of Nix?

[samuela]

@cdepillabout

• Should package maintainers be removed automatically if they stop responding to PR for their packages?

Yes.

@danieldk

• Implement a basic curses installer a la Slackware or BSD. Most installs that I do start out pretty standard, an installer with some basic choices would make it simpler/faster.

I implemented something like this, nixos-up.

Lots of great suggestions already, I would add:

• CODEOWNERS and integrations with meta.maintainers. If you are a maintainer, you are responsible for reviewing and merging the relevant PRs. If you don’t attend to PRs then you are removed so someone else can come in and take up the reins.
• More focus on server-side usage for NixOS, less emphasis on desktop. Desktop users are great (I am one), but in my experience it’s on the server where NixOS really shines. We should leverage that as a beachhead towards more adoption. In a similar vein, Nix-on-macOS should be a continued area of investment as that’s the #1 most popular platform for developers these days.
• home-manager should be part of NixOS.
• Better Nvidia/CUDA support
• Moonshot: start moving Nix away from C++ and into Rust since that’s the direction the universe is headed now.