Nix: The Breaking Point

https://kilo.bytesize.xyz/nix-the-breaking-point

by todsacerdoti • 2 years ago

36 82 2 years ago

kilo.bytesize.xyz

rijoja19• 2 years ago

Was this about some PC nonsense? This post doesn't really point to any concrete problems, but seem to be about someone trying to gain control over the project?

bananapub• 2 years ago

it is mostly used on personal-computers yes, but that's not really the crux of the issue.

rijoja19• 2 years ago

The acronym I was referring to was Political Correctness...

constantcrying• 2 years ago

Apparently it is about Nix, for the first time, seeing real world usage by a serious corporation, but that usage turning out to be autonomous drones aiding the US in killing random civilians on the other side of the world.

rijoja19• 2 years ago

Right, that explains it. The post is really lacking when it comes to concrete examples of what is going on.

"The ad-hoc structure of maintainers here better represent the goals of Nix users and their methods of success. Yet, these contributors are beginning to flee."

It also makes the claim above, is there any truth to that? Is there evidence of contributors fleeing, and if so where? What is stopping them from forking the project?

Cacti2• 2 years ago

Anduril specializes in counter-drone warfare and collaborative intelligence. They are not bombing civilians on the other side of the world.

brabel2• 2 years ago

Interesting for a Defence company to consider using an OSS project that's not in any way, as far as I know, tied to the US Government (or any other country).

What happens when a substantial amount of contributors come from China (which is common given how many developers are available in China)? Are they going to start restricting who can contribute? Or have strict vetoing of non-US nationals?

mid-kid• 2 years ago

I've seen a lot of articles about the Nix community lately and every single one is as vague as the next.

Can someone summarize, to someone who hasn't partaken in any official Nix channels, what the catalyst of this was, if any? Or at least what sorts of actions/events have caused this discontent?

chpatrick6• 2 years ago

Anduril is a big user of Nix and wanted to sponsor a conference, which upset some people because they're a part of the military industrial complex.

rijoja19• 2 years ago

"Much of the frustration has risen from inaction by authoritative figures. Whether inconsiderate sponsorship, conflicts of interest, harmful conduct, or a refusal to collaborate, these actions have repeatedly affirmed such positions of authority as the effective owners of Nix with no consequence."

Right so the author of the post in question, is in favour of Nix taking sponsorship from Andruil, or against it?

weinzierl2• 2 years ago

Just to add some more context: This is not a flash in the pan, but a drama unfolding for some months.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/08/nixcon_drops_anduril_...

There was also a longer discussion on HN 7 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37418351

BlueTemplar3• 2 years ago

And yet, unlike Guix, the Nix community doesn't seem to be bothered by using a part of the military industrial (spying) complex that is the Microsoft-owned Github.

Cacti2• 2 years ago

The majority of the tech industry is part of the military industrial complex. It's a shame more don't realize that.

rijoja19• 2 years ago

I haven't really had the time to read up on it, but it has gotten a lot of attention and seems really successful, and seems to have some extremely interesting solutions to some problems that I am interested in, so it seems that the Nix guys have done an amazing job.

Recently I heard that there was some drama about politics, and that might serve as an excuse for someone to step in and take over the organization, I don't really feel like giving these people attention however, so I haven't really looked into it all that deeply.

The first paragraph in this very post is just pure rhetorics without substance.

I suppose the point of the post is that whoever is behind kilo.bytesize.xyz should become the benevolent dictator for life of the project, due to pleasant sounding platitudes, or something?

depr3• 2 years ago

People are wondering what is going on and all you're saying is I don't know either, I haven't read anything except the first paragraph of the article, but maybe it's this thing. What purpose does that serve except to further muddy the waters, making the situation even harder to understand?

KingMob3• 2 years ago

This goes into more details, with links: https://github.com/KFearsoff/nix-drama-explained

mongol3• 2 years ago

It is a mirror of the culture war you see in other parts of the society. One faction wants to apply their values onto the project, some of which are non-universal. Especially, is sponsorship with military ties (i.e. defense sector) welcome. The other faction do not want to see subjective values to be applied like that.

depr3• 2 years ago

One faction wants to apply their values onto the project; another faction wants to apply or keep their respective values, which includes making money, and supports these values by claiming they are neutral or universal.

sloowm2• 2 years ago

You think taking a military advertisement is value neutral?

It's truly a mirror of the culture war you see in other parts of society where people declare things they like value neutral and things they don't like a war on culture.

ang_cire3• 2 years ago

Seriously. How do you write an entire post and not pin down one single person, place, thing, opinion, etc?

The only conclusion I can draw, as to why an author would choose to write only in generalities, is that any concrete facts or statements would be weaker under scrutiny, or less well received, than the uneasy benefit of the doubt that we extend someone making vague, unfalsifiable claims.

nebulous14• 2 years ago

I think this is written for the people in the Nix community. It's not intending to be an explainer for people outside it.

KingMob3• 2 years ago

This goes into more details, with receipts: https://github.com/KFearsoff/nix-drama-explained

amiga386• 2 years ago

You may consider this view biased, but we have this: https://srid.ca/nixos-mod

* September 2023: The "Nix Community Survey 2023" is looking for gender data, and the mods don't like that most contributors are men.

* November 2023: The moderation team tries to institute a Code of Conduct https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/pull/114 ... and they get their way

* November 2023: Some are not happy about it: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/moderation-team-accountability... -- the moderators talk about their "authority" and of course lock and hide the thread. It's "disruptive" and "off-topic", you see.

* This sort of activity continues -- moderators consolidating and increasing their power, citing how they need the power to control "concern trolls" and such -- and now in April 2024, we get https://save-nix-together.org/

The "anonymous contributors" want to drive out the NixOS founder entirely, so that _they_ are in charge. They want "to hold people accountable for bad behaviour at all levels" and lament having "responsibility without authority" - in other words, they want power, power, power. They want power over everyone. Their justification is that they believe they have the moral high ground, and they deserve to lord it over everyone else.

Hold onto that hard power, Eelco, and tell this lot to fork the project. Let's see how they enjoy moderating noxious.org instead of nixos.org

Macha• 2 years ago

The immediate tension is some people are unhappy for the second time that NixConf has accepted defense contractor Anduril as a sponsor, after a similar blow up last year was resolved due to the venue's rules banning military sponsors. I think the community took away from that the conference had accepted it was a bad idea and wouldn't do it again, but what the conference had taken away from it was "better check the venue's rules closely next time".

The longer boiling tensions that have led to this point:

- Flakes. They're largely promoted as the solution to composability but don't handle all use cases, and this has caused tensions with those that prefer more flexible but less ergonomic tools

- The decision making process that led to flakes being a thing. There was a community process established to replace the previous de-facto BDFL process with a community driven process, and then the previous de-facto BDFL merged flakes in and started promoting them without following said community process. Later attempts to engage with the community process have had the issues where flakes now have a lot of genuine community support, but also some resistance from core contributors due to either the genuine feature gaps, or the fact that they're now presented as a fait accompli.

- Moderation. There was a significant contributor who was up to some hateful conduct in (mostly) non-Nix community spaces that was banned across all project venues. There were groups unhappy that they were banned, and groups unhappy that they were not banned quickly enough. The project tried to navigate this with an attempt at middle grounding their moderation policies, which annoyed both groups.

- Corporate influence from Determinate Systems: Newer initiatives from the former BDFL have mostly been announced through the company they founded Determinate Systems, and include stuff like a centralised repository in the form of Flake Hub. You can either see that as "proving it in the wild before bringing it to the community process" or "bypassing the community process to make it a fait accompli", but either way the ex-defacto-BDFL seems to see the community process as too slow and is end-running it with his new company.

- Corporate influence from other parties: DetSys is getting the most hate right now due to employing the ex-defacto-BDFL and still having enough leadership positions to be seen as responsible, but other groups like Tweag or Cachix have also been seen as attempting to commercialise parts of the ecosystem at time.

KingMob3• 2 years ago

https://github.com/KFearsoff/nix-drama-explained

infinisil• 2 years ago

This is a great post, very well said!

Over the weekend I’ve been working with NixOS foundation members and other community members to address what you’re describing, and I’m happy to say that the foundation is very willing to delegate governance to the community!

This kind of thing takes time to erect, but I’m doing my best to push this swiftly while trying to limit burnout. Stay tuned for a statement from the NixOS foundation this week!

rijoja19• 2 years ago

Maybe if you're up to speed with the internal politics of the nix project. If you're not it reads like a lot of grandstanding, and asking people to resign, without giving concrete examples of what has gone wrong.

Hugsun• 2 years ago

I didn't know about these problems until now and this article didn't tell me anything besides that there are issues in the nix community.

It's a bit like long form subtweeting.

brabel2• 2 years ago

This seems to be the new way people have decided to discuss polemic topics about their projects: avoid all mention of specific disagreements or god forbid people, and be as vague as possible about everything.

Remember the Rust polemic where the entire Rust moderation team resigned? I was following the debate at the time and could barely understand what the actual problem was... only after reading A LOT of arguments in multiple websites I was able to kind of understand what was going on (here I am being vague myself, ha! If you know what that was all about, please comment, I don't feel like I can do it properly).

What is this all about? Is it a particular person, or organization, being a troublemaker?? Is it one event? Many?

Do you think your project's internal politics are some kind of "state secret" or what?? And by the way, why do Governments have so many secrets anyway!?!?! You've got to be up to no good to want to keep everything bloody hidden!

For goodness' sake, just spit it out!! We can handle the truth.

nebulous14• 2 years ago

As far as I can tell the core issue is that one of the larger corporate users of Nix is a US defence contractor called Anduril. Anduril were one of the sponsors of the 2024 NA NixCon, which is a official conference run by the NixOS foundation. The acceptance of this sponsorship has caused some conflict.

taosx• 2 years ago

NOT WORTH THE READ.

All the posts that appeared recently on Nix have the same vague, over-politicized language where they are complaining that the person with most potential as a dictator is not one and they want more power to make decision in behalf of nixos.

I feel for Dolstra, pain in the ....

kreetx• 2 years ago

As a user of nix I most certainly will continue to use it, there isn't really any need to know about the community issues at all. I also don't think there is any reason to "fork it" either, just go to a forum or chat room where you can keep things technical and plow forward.

kkfx3• 2 years ago

NixOS generic user here: allow me to be a bit rude, NOT to light fire but to extinguish them:

- apparently the current rupture came from a company sponsorship to a Nix Foundation conference, due to the fact this company (Anduril, a heavy NixOS user and contributor) is a mil-tech one, well... I doubt that's the reason. I know many with strong opinion to a point of leaving if some of their principle is touched or even discussed, but that's can't be a community-wide cause, nixpkgs is one of the largest package system of the world, hard to believe that it's community polarize around such event;

- IMVHO the very issue is that Nix{,OS,pkgs} is a FLOSS project but itself it does not reflect a FLOSS one, having some "central" elements (the cache, github infra etc) that are more a commercial structure than a community owned one, and there is a big dispersion in current development: NixOps seems to be abandoned, Disnix is not a complete replacement, Flakes seems to be the future, but they are still experimental end not much documented, home-manager is still a separated things and so on, the hard-to-digest nix language does not help.

Long story short it's not a matter of mil-tech, lack or abuse of authority but the fact that:

- a commercial project have targets, a vision, all party involved do what they can to implement/reach the defined goals

- a community project have a multitude of visions and targets, it change a bit a time, sometimes fast, sometimes slow, with many branches, sometimes competing sometimes cooperating,

Unfortunately, to go the commercial project route we need a hierarchy, contracts and so on, to go the community project root we need a community-matching structure, central points, with people owning them do not works well.

Now, having no official repo, build system etc is hard, some have proposed some tools, but they do not develop much and they do not perform much. I think the point is looking at a more classic FLOSS approach, an entity do the commercial aspects with an official release, while the larger slice of the community create independent hubs, there is not need to be all in the same place as long as the codebase start openly and openly evolve.

rijoja19• 2 years ago

So why not fork the project?

kkfx3• 2 years ago

Because there are some central points, for witch you need or a decentralized system (absent, so far) or big money to build another... That's the "hybrid model issue" I'm talking about.

Shared binaries from /nix/store in a torrent-style setup might be feasible, but so far there is none. Similarly distributed build for large projects (LibreOffice, Firefox etc) might be possible, but so fare there is none. There are servers dedicated to that, paid for that. Not-so-small companies could pay. Public universities as well, but in the present world public uni do not even mirror anymore FLOSS projects, so... We need a distributed architecture to keep up FLOSS.

Borealid2• 2 years ago

The primary value in nix is in the packages, not the configuration language and not the prebuilt cache system.

If one were to fork the project, the sensible way to do that would be to build a nixpkg-compatible alternative system that doesn't have some of the design flaws (such as a global non-discoverable configuration namespace and an underdocumented custom functional programming language...).

I don't think anyone's gotten together the hours to do that. But I'd certainly love to build an immutable, repeatable system using a Python or Kotlin config myself.

weinzierl2• 2 years ago

The NixOS foundation is a non-profit organization registered in the Netherlands. Since non-profit can mean a variety of things, maybe someone with more insight can explain a little bit. It would be especially interesting to know which of the various US 501 variants is closest to what the NixOS foundation is.

barfbagginus• 2 years ago

I've been reviewing some of the nix packages for apps I care about, including python and zotero. It's a little bit difficult to argue that these packages are much cleaner than the zotero or python packages you'd see in Debian, Arch, or Alpine.

They're big balls of mud, exacerbated somewhat by nix's tendency to encourage inline expressions and shell scripts. This reintroduces a need to mentally interpret intermediate values, conflicting with easy audits - a big reason for declarative packaging in the first place. I've avoided adopting nix given that I didn't see a clear path towards cleaning up these kinds of packages.

I wonder if this community shakeup could be an opportunity for a more literate and prosaic format for nix. If we're booting some of the long time chooms on account of them being socially regressive, what would you bet that they're also the reason for nix's seemingly "non-negotiable" technical debts? I guess we'll see!

Here's hoping the fork will be a nicer place with cleaner codes.

Nix: The Breaking Point

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