documentation isn’t sexy so not many want to do it
Don’t think that’s the primary issue. Most of us can appreciate good documentation.
It’s more of a resource problem. We could either be writing docs or working on literally everything else. Docs are important but so are updates, fixes and new packages/modules/etc. Most of us contribute in our free time and would rather spend that little time on ensuring that the distribution works.
nix/nixos maintainers undervalue documentation efforts - I’ve tried to get in pull requests, but they just stall (not reviewed, nitpicked to death, simply not merged, etc.)
Not at all. It’s, again, a resource distribution problem. That happens to many, many PRs, regardless of what they actually do. We have a rather severe shortage of reviewer time.
Nitpicks can be annoying but the people do it because they actually do care; quite a lot.
very top heavy decision making process harms the community.
What kind of decisions are we talking about? The RFC process is the exact opposite of “top heavy”.
Some person with hundreds of commits can push through nearly any change (good or bad) relatively quickly, unless other frequent contributors are really really against it.
No. Someone recently got their commit access revoked for self-merging something that was really not good. We care about quality.
However, fresher contributor with a great change is forced to go through a never-ending process and few stay to actually finalize it.
Yup, that happens. We don’t have enough time to give newcomers a really good experience.
Though if I’m honest, a fresh contributor should rather get more of a feel for the processes and conventions for a bit before trying to implement a “great change” (as in: size and complexity) anyways. That massively reduces the need to go back and forth over obvious mistakes a more experienced contributor would simply not have made.
maintainers can simply (and do) create a PR, make a change and merge it.
And it’s frowned upon. Especially if that touches something someone else maintains and no reasonable response time was given.
Again, someone recently had their commit access removed for doing exactly that. We don’t like this either and this issue is slowly but surely getting better now.
These difficulties just make me want to fork nixos.