What is Nickel? Is this an officially endorsed project? It’s run by Tweag — do they run Nix? Most core contributors work for Tweag. What is the fate of the Nix language? Should I start investing in this new language?
Why is documentation still so bad? Why is there not a clear and official answer to documentation generation? Syntax linting? Testing? Who is in charge of trying to fix SEO for documentation?
Nix is technologically sound but is struggling organizationally from its explosive growth
In this case, "it's experimental" should be read as "maybe the team will decide to make changes", rather than "it's not going to work half the time".
e.g. one change they made was changing the property "defaultPackage" to "packages.default".
(Anyway, the UX improvements from flakes are good, that once you've got the boilerplate, flakes are amazing).
> Nix is technologically sound but is struggling organizationally from its explosive growth
Well, that's the opposite problem of 'floundering'.
In that case, I can't in good conscience recommend we use such a feature at my workplace. We can't afford huge breaking changes, which is what that flag suggests. Which means my workplace is stuck with a bunch of `shell.nix` and `direnv` magic instead of clean flake-based envs.
It's not enough to gate features behind a flag, unless your only audience is enthusiasts. Versioning your features makes them accessible to a wider audience and encourages more risk-averse folks to adopt the features despite the possibility that they may undergo slight changes.
just pin the nix package itself and that should ensure the flake API remains consistent for however many months/years you want?
That kind of circular reasoning seems problematic.
Don't get me wrong, I like flakes, I use them for my NixOS setup, but the way that flakes development has been handled is very concerning.
You sound like you have something particular in mind.
If I look at the Nix RFCs, flakes was as RFC 0049 https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/pull/49
Maybe Alyssa's comment here? https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/pull/136#discussion_r987278726
+1. The explosive growth has resulted in organic blossoming of several new ideas, approaches and templates. Not all of them are great and it takes time to sift through them to see if there are canonical approaches.
The creation of the team to streamline these ideas, bless some official paths is well timed.
> In this case, "it's experimental" should be read as "maybe the team will decide to make changes", rather than "it's not going to work half the time".
This I think is part of the problem. People see the "experimental" label and don't understand that it's not "experimental" in the sense they're used to. Maybe labeling flakes as a "beta" feature and featuring the documentation more prominently would ease the confusion.
This is exactly the clarification that needs to happen. It hasn't yet, and we've been needing it. That's what I mean by "floundering". Nix isn't broken, but its development progress has been needing explicit direction and clarity.
That's why I'm excited to hear a team is being put together. This is a great opportunity to bring some decisiveness into Nix's development.
That's the opposite of floundering, no?
I'm not close enough to Nix development to know whether this is the case or not in this instance, but the Discourse post makes a compelling argument about pull request statistics. Sibling commenters also point out that flakes have become a de facto standard despite being hidden behind an experimental flag, suggesting that the flag has lingered too long and without clear ownership or authority around stabilizing the feature. That indecision feels like floundering.
It felt like that to me for a really long time, in between the releases of Nix 2.3 and 2.4, when there were lots of features being added but there was no release schedule. The divide between flakes users and non-flakes users was also larger then, as the feature was gated behind not just an experimental flag, but pre-release versions of Nix.
Since then, Nix has gotten into a regular, fairly rapid release cycle and new functionality is released pretty often. There are various concerns about what that change does and doesn't fix for Nix, but for me at least there's no longer that feeling of stagnation or mystery about when Nix will see a stable update released.
> flakes have become a de facto standard despite being hidden behind an experimental flag, suggesting that the flag has lingered too long and without clear ownership or authority around stabilizing the feature. That indecision feels like floundering
Flakes have been conceived and pushed forward by the original author and chief maintainer of Nix. In the earliest stages of their development, consensus proved difficult to build and the community RFC process was very young. Suspending that RFC and adding the features to the master branch but marking them 'experimental' was an attempted compromise on the part of Eelco Dolstra, who had previously more or less taken a BDFL approach to maintaining Nix.
Since then, the flakes implementation has matured quite a bit. I think most users expect that it will evolve into an official feature soon and without many fundamental changes, although some community members still feel some bitterness about that initial process as well as skepticism about the scope and necessity of the whole suite of features that come with flakes.
At the same time, many RFCs have gone through the process since then. The organization of the projects and processes for getting ambitious changes approved are much more explicit now. In those ways, it's clear that leadership/governance in the Nix community is becoming more organized and more effective.
(And yes, I absolutely agree that if we could go back in time and change it to pretty much anything else that would be better.)
But in terms of contributions, capabilities, and userbase, the Nix lately been subject to impressive and exciting growth that you mention. I think the best is yet to come, but it's already fair to say that Nix is flourishing.
The community and the codebases also do have growing pains, of course. But I don't think that Nix is floundering at all.
