Hugo Buddelmeijer <[email protected]> skribis: >> Now, Nixpkgs, again, is not CRAN; it is the largest *and* most >> up-to-date distro. We can learn from them. > > I think their primary advantage is that Nixpkgs has more people. > About 10x as much it seems.
Yes, and also 3.7x more packages according to <https://repology.org/>. > Secondly, it seems all packages have an explicit set of > maintainers. For example their onnx has two maintainers, and those > maintainers are only maintainer of a handful of packages each. > > Adding a new package to Nix requires you to either become a maintainer > yourself, or find someone who is willing to adopt the package. This is a model we rejected early on in Guix (see commit 154f1f0937754fafac0c6288dd458b66b332e6bb) in favor of collaborative maintenance, now incarnated as teams. I won’t claim this is perfect but the choice was motivated by different group dynamics and informed by the experience of Debian. > But I feel we are taking this too lightly. People will want to have > some time left to actually use the packages :-). Many people have been working hard, be it on tooling or on the actual update work; those people certainly don’t take it too lightly. We need self-awareness: awareness of our weaknesses, as you rightfully point out, but also of our strengths and the long road already traveled. > Did someone ever make a plot to see how out-of-date our packages are > over time? Might be interesting to see whether we are on the right > track. https://repology.org/repository/gnuguix Ludo’.
