- I took a long time adapting to flakes. It was a big leap, the official docs took a long time, and still I can’t find docs for many of the options I need.
- Finding builtin and standard library functions. I used to full-text search through the corresponding parts of the nixpkgs and nix manuals, often ending up simply not completing my task because it was so complicated to find the right function. Luckily there is noogle.dev now.
- Some big packages cannot be properly built in nixpkgs, see e.g. https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/152626 and related PRs for many roadblocks we encountered while trying to build cockroach from source. We tried many times with different contributors, getting stuck at different points. I even went to an in-person meetup to find people to help us with that, but we couldn’t make progress.
- In the past I found it hard to get my PRs merged. I discovered PRs ready for review _ and related threads, and at some time even got my own commit bit, but I think it’s still hard for others.
- I paused reviewing PRs on nixpkgs for the time being, because they are too many. Yes, that’s counterintuitive, but that’s how it is. Half of the PRs are minor version bumps which I consider, frankly, a waste of my time to review, because I don’t know what I can do with them other than simply merging if all ofborg jobs are green. A bot could do that so why not automatise it instead. The other half of the PRs (the manually created ones) are nearly always on a topic that I don’t understand, so I’m hoping that someone more knowledgeable will come around to reviewing them. The tiny fraction of PRs where I know my way around are surprisingly hard to find. I used to dig for those, but for one where I could add value there were 20 to click through where I couldn’t, which was time and energy consuming, so I stopped.
- Surprisingly often, nix-related tools (see e.g. https://github.com/ryantm/nixpkgs-update/issues/265) are not packaged in nixpkgs. This may have diverse technical reasons though.
- The “green hydra debate” is not resolved to many people’s satisfaction. I would like to see much more automation in nixpkgs, burdening humans only with interesting nontrivial questions. (I.e. let minor package bumps be merged automatically.) But every time someone proposes a change in that direction it seems like it is being shouted down very quickly.
- We’re using nix at work to provide a dev environment on some laptops. There are a lot of pitfalls for beginners. Usually if something doesn’t work, nix/nixpkgs is always one of the primary suspects. This makes any kind of larger adoption in our team hard.
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