Nice! I’m really looking forward to this. I’ve been playing with nix for a while, but there were some things that prevented me from seriously adopt it (e.g. flakes are still considered experimental, but they are widely used).
I think so. The language (Scheme) is a lot more logical to me, and the higher focus on reproducibility in the main channel compared to Nix (Guix can be bootstrapped from a tiny binary seed) is a draw for me.
Just use Nix and see where the drama goes in a year. I’m guessing your configs will be fully compatible or only require minimal changes, if the forks survive that long in the first place.
I’d suggest learning nix, flakes, and home-manager before going anywhere close to NixOS. This should help you out
I disagree with @Shareni (sorry!) - the biggest issue right now is that package maintainers are leaving in droves - at least 15 contributors left a few days ago, a number which has likely increased these past few days - and will continue to increase. I think the only people left will be the ones who support Eelco and the toxic culture brewed by him.
What this means is that you risk your packages getting out of date, including slow delivery of security updates (which was already an increasing concern, due to the way the Nixpkgs build system worked). Worst case scenario, some (many?) packages may never even get an update.
So now’s definitely NOT a good time to switch, and in fact I’d also urge existing users to look at other distros, at least temporarily until this whole thing settles down.
I guess it depends on what you’re planning doing with NixOS or Aux. I wouldn’t use it for anything new and critical. I’d figure out a mitigation strategy if I were relying on it for something critical.
But for experimental purposes, neither option seems like a bad call.
I’ve been tempted for a while to switch from good old reliable Arch (btw) to NixOS, but now I’m glad I procrastinated and just ran it in a little VM specimen jar instead.
You should learn the nix lang, flakes, zero to nix, etc and try not to get bogged down in the Nix/Aux stuff. Be prepared to wait for things to settle down on that side.
This looks good, I’ll switch over as soon as they decided on a hoster. I don’t have too much experience working in open source projects, but I’ll try to contribute what I can
If you’re looking for a TL;DR of the situation, here it is:
Nix community had a governance crisis for years. While there has been progress on building explicit teams to govern the project, it continued to fundamentally rely on implicit authority and soft power
Eelco Dolstra, as one of the biggest holders of this implicit authority and soft power, has continuously abused this authority to push his decisions, and to block decisions that he doesn’t like
Crucially, he also used his implicit authority to block any progress on solving this governance crisis and establishing systems with explicit authority
This has led uncountably many people to burn out over the issue, and culminated in writing an open letter to have Eelco resign from all formal positions in the project and take a 6 month break from any involvement in the community
Eelco wrote a response that largely dismisses the issues brought up, and advertises his company’s community as a substitute for Nix community
has continuously abused this authority to push his decisions, and to block decisions that he doesn’t like
Hmm. I’ve seen this before. It looks like the “sensationalist” crowd has issues with people who don’t go along with their sensationalism.
I’m not a Nix expert nor do I know the inner-workings of its management. I’ve just seen this so many times that I don’t expect more from people at this point.
It sucks when idiots group together to push smart people into doing their bidding. I respect those who resist it, though.
As a side note, I understand why Gitea and Forgejo went for a “copy GitHub Actions” approach to their CI, but man do I wish more self-hosted repo software tried to copy Drone/Woodpecker instead. Iterative containers in the pipeline is such a smoother build experience, and it kind of sucks that Gitness is the only one doing it (that I know of).
There’s plenty, but I do not wish to hijack this thread, so… have a look at the Forgejo 7.0 release notes, the PRs it links to along notable features (and a boatload of bugfixes, many of which aren’t in Gitea). Then compare when (and if) similar features or fixes were implemented in Gitea.
The major difference (apart from governance, and on a technical level) between Gitea and Forgejo is that Forgejo cherry picks from Gitea weekly (being a hard fork doesn’t mean all ties are severed, it means that development happens independently). Gitea does not cherry pick from Forgejo. They could, the license permits it, and it even permits sublicensing, so it’s not an obstacle for Gitea Cloud or Gitea EE, either. They just don’t.
I dunno, some of these are a pretty big deal, in particular:
Gitea repeatedly makes choices that leave Gitea admins exposed to known vulnerabilities during extended periods of time. For instance Gitea spent resources to undergo a SOC2 security audit for its SaaS offering while critical vulnerabilities demanded a new release. Advance notice of security releases is for customers only.
Gitea is developed on github, whereas forgejo is developed on and by codeberg, who use it as their main forge (also mentioned on that page). Someone dogfooding gives me more confidence in the software.
I like #Nix, I do not like what has happened to it.
With no explanation of what happened, the conclusion is almost certainly Internal politics.
It seems like forgejo split from gitea because it looked like gitea was going the route of gitlab. Idk if NixOS is going to commercialize though. Based on recent gossip it sounds like they’re overly adverse to commercialization. IE banning people for having DoD connections. Aux’s talk about special interest groups makes it sound like they’re going embrace that like redhat.
I think the reason is because apparently a lot of people are unhappy with a deal Nix inked apparently with a company that does business with the US’ Immigrations and Customs
Hopefully it is delay due to setting up self-hosted options. I would support it if I didn’t have to use Microsoft GitHub—Nixpkgs is the reason my account hasn’t been deactivated.
These aren’t well established where you can see the post was created in ’18. If they were established, you would seem them in the raw https://raw.githubusercontent.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/master/CONTRIBUTING.md. You can see folks having issues with using Discourse as a mailing list since it doesn’t quite work as expected & still requires review by someone with merge access to the primary repository. There is a SourceHut one that actually has some activity & I believe was once listed under the one of the contributing guides, but I can’t remember where it was listed. I doubt many maintainers are properly checking their email too despite listing them on the maintainer.nix file. I would hedge to say that unless the community migrates away, you would see folks complaining the tread above about disliking that there is no pull requests with instead push to the default branch so we would asume all contributions in practices will be expected to be done thru MS GitHub. As it stands going thru the mailing list puts a lot of friction on everyone & wastes time of other maintainers that are expected to then raise a PR on your behalf for review. Say that PR does get opened on your behalf, now you want to follow it since it’s your patch… well too bad since MS GitHub has no way of subscribing to PR threads like it does some aspects of by adding .atom to the end of a URL. As such, if you really want the in-practice option to not be under Microsoft’s domain, you’ll need to remove Microsoft from being the primary forge, relegating it to a mirror or dropping it outright.
What a horrible name. I literally had to search for “aux nix” to find a Reddit post mentioning the URL. Every other search term combination was giving me results for ps aux.
Thanks for sharing them. Looking at the thread and the author’s responses, it doesn’t seem like he’s open to changing the name. Not sure if that’s off to a good start, but we’ll see…
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevie_Nicks - one of the world’s most celebrated female singers, famously part of Fleetwood Mac in the 70s. Thought it was a funny pun.
It’s not really worth it IMO except for lisp and Emacs packages. The biggest issue for me was that nearly every other package I need was seriously out of date.
There’s been some controversy around the governance structure and culture with NixOS that has a number of people unhappy. I’m honestly not sure of the details but it’s ptesumably less about the software than the people.