>>> Well, it was just an example. My point was merely that it's not enough to 
>>> point out a problem, whenever possible you should point out solutions and 
>>> be willing to do the legwork necessary to implement them.
>> The real problem is that for many things it does look like the problem
>> is in value clash. There are people who want less lost patches and more
>> committing whatever is not too disruptive and there are people who want
>> more review, but they are objectively overloaded and so sometimes lose
>> patches and, seemingly, consider rate of loss unfortunate but 
>> acceptable.
>You're talking a lot about value clash here. That's why I opened this thread, 
>because we have people with different values but no one is really coming out 
>and saying "this is what I want, this is why what's here now is bad". It's 
>possible that when all is said and done there's no decision we can come to 
>that will satisfy all parties, but we can't know until we know what the 
>parties actually want. Please, if you have a vision for what the nix projects 
>could be but aren't, share it. Otherwise it's highly unlikely that the nix you 
>want to be will come into existence.

Well, I admire nix-the-packaging model. 

There are some things that I consider good with various evaluations
in the community (some of them towards the end I never formulated 
before - but now that I think of them...):

- There is a reasonable public place where I can see every package 
expression used by any committer. So, if someone uses a git-head version
of kernel, it would be nice to see what overrides were needed.

- There is a reasonable way for partial overrides of packages. That way
when I look at a private overrided package I can see what the changes 
relative to trunk are. Better yet if the changes are semantically 
separated (where applicable). Currently it is partially enough - 
changing preBuild usually means copying and editing. 

- There is a way to add support for marginal improvements to the default
builder without full rebuild (why would we want to need stdenv-updates
just to add xz support?)

- The big packages used by many people are regularly and succesfully 
built in a centralized way

- On the level of Nix as a package manager, there is a way to roll back
everything but GC

- There is a simple way to declare something an acceptable substitute of
something else.

- There is a simple way to derive a version of package with dependency
versions changed (for use with subsituters, mainly)

- There is a way to replace subsituted package with a "better" 
substitution or native build

I do not expect that any of them are widely shared (except existence of
LibreOffice packages and rollback possibility, I hope), but as starting
points..

Also, 

I value fast addition of new packages/new package versions above rarity
of local breakages in the fastest-moving branch. I separately value not
turning contributors away above avoidance of short glitches.

I think that having a partially-incompatible previous version (unless 
there is a security issue) and a few bleeding-edge snapshots in addition
to the default release in the main package set is more often beneficial 
than harmful.



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