On 07/28/2014 03:55 AM, hasufell 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.
[...]
A lot of projects (some successfully) ensure focus by limiting the
number of core developers to the absolute minimum, which means
decision-making is pretty easy. At the same time they open up the gates
for random collaboration. This implies a well designed review workflow
with very responsive and active developers for this to function
properly, otherwise people will give up on overcomplicated contribution
procedures/channels and do their own thing.
I'd pretty much say that the linux kernel runs this model successfully,
although reasons for this are probably a bit more complicated.

As has been said, there are no hard rules. We still just rely on judgement of those with commit rights and some agreements from before.

My view: the kernel model is infeasible for us (ATM). People and even companies use nix(os) to do what they want/need, and their improvements are contributed back (partly?). It's more of a symbiosis of people where each has his/her own "focus" and aims.

Decisions in such a model can become difficult, but fortunately nix(os) is very handy in supporting multiple different solutions independently.


Now a few clarifications:

On 07/28/2014 05:37 AM, Mathnerd314 wrote:
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.

Guix doesn't use the nix *language*, and so they have their own counterpart of nixpkgs. IIRC they write expressions in guile, but generate the same primitive *.drv files, so they share the nix store and the process of building outputs from *.drv derivations. (i.e. the amount of sharing is relatively *very* small)

Personally, I consider it the only known real "fork" of nixos.org stuff (perhaps not in typical sense of fork).

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.

True, the number of people with lots of contributions aren't high. In the github NixOS organization there are 36 people, actually, as some have selected "private membership". (I've got no idea what it's good for, when everyone can see what people commit, but I guess most people didn't notice/care about the choice.)


Vlada


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