On Mon, Jul 28, 2014 at 3:55 AM, hasufell <hasuf...@gentoo.org> wrote:
> However, since I'v seen a lot of things gone wrong in distros (primarily > gentoo), I am curious if you have a concept for ensuring that NixOS > stays focussed. > I believe the closest thing available is https://nixos.org/wiki/The_Many_Cooks_Method. So far, Eelco has maintained most of the infrastructure, but in the future (according to that wiki page) other organizations will begin maintaining their own installations as well. Perhaps this has already started in the form of Guix; they have their own instance of Hydra, their own Guix packages, etc., but still use Nix, the underlying software, basically out of the box. As Ertugrul says, the development model is very open to contributions; you just have to figure out which repository you want to get them into. The only truly difficult part is merging everything back together, but so far Git and the expressiveness of Nix have been sufficient. > Gentoo here is almost the complete opposite with >200 core developers > and it is rapidly losing focus and consistency every year. > There have been a fairly steady stream of interested Gentoo users and developers (yourself included, presumably), but I believe most of them have turned away. They have said (probably correctly) that the project is still a bit too experimental / unstable for them to switch. That will change in a few years if Nix keeps chugging along, so I am not too worried about it, but it is something to keep in mind. Eventually, they will have to be recruited somehow into testing all of the unstable packages. > > I almost think that a centralized distribution model is doomed to fail. > That does not only include the workflow with review platforms, DVCS > tools etc., but also the political and organizational structure. > Debian is centralized, and I have seen no signs of it failing (other than that they seem to be intent on rewriting dpkg to be more Nix-like instead of just adopting Nix :-) ). I've heard some rumors about a NixOS social contract, but nothing has materialized yet. > > I don't see much information about these points on your website (only > technical stuff). > NixOS is pretty small now (only 21 people, according to https://github.com/orgs/NixOS/people) so there hasn't been much need to write it down. If you look at contributors to the main Nix repo ( https://github.com/NixOS/nix/graphs/contributors), then it's even tinier; Eelco wrote all the code (3400+ commits), and everyone else has contributed to the Nix language or done building/porting fixes (209 commits, if I can do addition correctly in my head). I've been thinking about writing some core changes, and shlevy has started on a Haskell rewrite ( https://github.com/shlevy/hnix-store/), but in the meantime it is indeed a one-man project with random contributions, following the "focus by limiting core developers" criteria. -- Mathnerd314
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