- cross-posted to:
- nix@programming.dev
Is the fork still going to happen?
Nice! I’m really looking forward to this. I’ve been playing with nix for a while, but there were some things that prevented me from seriously adopt it (e.g. flakes are still considered experimental, but they are widely used).
Is Guix a cleaner base for a NixOS alternative ?
Sadly no AFAIK, even ignoring the licensing issues.
They are very diverged projects, but share the same philosophy. The Nix packages themselves aren’t the problem, its the organization backing them. So this fork is attempting to create better governance and organization, so that the good underlying tech can keep going and progress.
For example, Flakes have been held back from truly flourishing because the governing body has purposefully held back changes to those systems for nontechnical problems, but rather political conflicts with their proprietary offerings.
Think of the fork the same way we had the Alma/Rocky forks off of CentOS. Its political rather than technical, so keeping the same base tech helps adoption. Over time we can improve or replace parts of the ecosystem as the needs of this new project grow.
I think so. The language (Scheme) is a lot more logical to me, and the higher focus on reproducibility in the main channel compared to Nix (Guix can be bootstrapped from a tiny binary seed) is a draw for me.
Was waiting for that to happen
Not very clear to me that this is any more valuable than OG NixOS.
This sounds a lot like the forgejo vs gitea fork. I love the forgejo people but I am yet to see a sufficient differentiator.
I think the reason is because apparently a lot of people are unhappy with a deal Nix inked apparently with a company that does business with the US’ Immigrations and Customs
Wait so people got butthurt that a company made a deal with nix. That company also does business with ICE. And people are mad at Nix?
What am I missing?
Also companies and open source entities do business with all manner of government(s) all the time.
Don’t really know, hit something about it elsewhere, but it didn’t say anything more than that, but yeah, that seems to be the gist of things.
I like #Nix, I do not like what has happened to it.
With no explanation of what happened, the conclusion is almost certainly Internal politics.
It seems like forgejo split from gitea because it looked like gitea was going the route of gitlab. Idk if NixOS is going to commercialize though. Based on recent gossip it sounds like they’re overly adverse to commercialization. IE banning people for having DoD connections. Aux’s talk about special interest groups makes it sound like they’re going embrace that like redhat.
https://forgejo.org/compare-to-gitea/
I dunno, some of these are a pretty big deal, in particular:
Gitea repeatedly makes choices that leave Gitea admins exposed to known vulnerabilities during extended periods of time. For instance Gitea spent resources to undergo a SOC2 security audit for its SaaS offering while critical vulnerabilities demanded a new release. Advance notice of security releases is for customers only.
Gitea is developed on github, whereas forgejo is developed on and by codeberg, who use it as their main forge (also mentioned on that page). Someone dogfooding gives me more confidence in the software.
Tbf most of gitea is hosted on gitea: https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/1029
Just not the main repo because of a blocking issue (which makes the above link pretty annoying)
They were still pulling in mainline Gitea changes while introducing their own stuff last I checked.
Pulling in mainline gitea changes, I did see. But I didn’t see any notable differences from gitea. Do you know of any?
There’s plenty, but I do not wish to hijack this thread, so… have a look at the Forgejo 7.0 release notes, the PRs it links to along notable features (and a boatload of bugfixes, many of which aren’t in Gitea). Then compare when (and if) similar features or fixes were implemented in Gitea.
The major difference (apart from governance, and on a technical level) between Gitea and Forgejo is that Forgejo cherry picks from Gitea weekly (being a hard fork doesn’t mean all ties are severed, it means that development happens independently). Gitea does not cherry pick from Forgejo. They could, the license permits it, and it even permits sublicensing, so it’s not an obstacle for Gitea Cloud or Gitea EE, either. They just don’t.
Forgejo is working on federation. That is the big item.
Nothing concrete from what I can tell. Becoming a hard fork is relatively recent though (mid-November of last year, roughly).
As a side note, I understand why Gitea and Forgejo went for a “copy GitHub Actions” approach to their CI, but man do I wish more self-hosted repo software tried to copy Drone/Woodpecker instead. Iterative containers in the pipeline is such a smoother build experience, and it kind of sucks that Gitness is the only one doing it (that I know of).
Last time I checked they were working on forgejo runners / actions!
NixOS forked
Sounds like it broke and you wanted to f-bomb it in the Good Place.
Wait, why can’t I say fork?
Forking shirtballs!
That’s fscked
I would love to host a mirror of the ecosystem once the fork is underway. I made a small attempt a little while ago to create a mirror of the Nix repos but the documentation on how to set it up was lacking. Hosting a Debian mirror is relatively easy, Nix appeared quite a bit more obfuscated.
Nice. I guess there will be more news on their Mastodon account or their website at some point : https://hachyderm.io/@jakehamilton/112349915028065428
Dude still hasn’t decided where to host the repo. It’s not an alternative, guix is…
Aux is more similar to Nix, than Guix is.
Guix uses the same concepts, but still is very different.
What a horrible name. I literally had to search for “aux nix” to find a Reddit post mentioning the URL. Every other search term combination was giving me results for
ps aux
.Same. Short it nice, but it has to be unique and memorable too. Aux is an already existing word.
Things that don’t exist yet
- Lunix - sounds like linux and nix just with i and u swapped
- Originix - very close to https://orignix.com/ but not the same
- Nunix - New Nix
- Froxin - Jumble of fork + nix
- Apenix - Apex of nix
- Nirofs - Nix Is a Read Only FileSystem
Suprisingly already exist
- Nuxor - Lindt Nuxor is a chocolate
- Aunix - auxiliary nix - https://www.aunixinternational.com/ already exists though
- XiniX - a mirror of nix (xinix.nl exists though)
- Lixin - shit this also exists as a brand
- Fornix - fork + nix - is part of our brain
- nixzen - spanish company
- zenix - Zenith of nix - another spanish company?
- Apaux - Apex of auxiliary nix - surprisingly is a band
- Araknix - some toy
- naaix - sounds like nice - is a damn boat company
Probably some LLM could come up with something too given a good prompt.
What about Stevie?
Sounds like a human or pet name. Would be a good name a mascot, maybe 🤔
How did you come up with Stevie as a project name?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevie_Nicks - one of the world’s most celebrated female singers, famously part of Fleetwood Mac in the 70s. Thought it was a funny pun.
AFAIK LUnix exists as the “little Unix” project aiming to run on the Commodore 6502 computers.
There’s even a video where someone got it to run on a Famicom.
Agreed, I made a thread for it. You’ve got some good names!
Thanks for sharing them. Looking at the thread and the author’s responses, it doesn’t seem like he’s open to changing the name. Not sure if that’s off to a good start, but we’ll see…
He got convinced, its now Auxolotl!
Theres going to be an official reevaluation once the governance has finished bootstrapping.
That’s definitely better! 👍
I vote for nunix, it’s the only one I’d remember easily.
Fornix sounds surprisingly sexual.
Apenix
And this sounds like nix for apes 🐵
I read it as “a pin nix” like appendix with a lisp
Hopefully it is delay due to setting up self-hosted options. I would support it if I didn’t have to use Microsoft GitHub—Nixpkgs is the reason my account hasn’t been deactivated.
You can contribute to Nixpkgs without GitHub account
https://discourse.nixos.org/t/about-the-patches-category/477
Mailinglists are such a joke. They are a terrible user experience all around. It’s like being stuck in the 90s.
Mailing lists are a platform/protocol not really a UI. IRC is trash if all you are using is some terrible web UI, but much better with proper native apps designed around its use cases. Mailing lists are a massive improvement over Discord that so many projects tend to use instead. I’d take a mailing list over a Discord “server” every day.
Yeah, I’m not even talking about the UI, but the UX of mailinglists. The UI is terrible, but I find the UX even worse.
IRC is yet another protocol from another era. Most clients don’t parse links and don’t provide link previews, don’t support code blocks or syntax highlighting, don’t support threads, don’t support listing the slash commands, don’t support images, don’t support markdown, no audio, no video, servers can’t group chat rooms like matrix, there’s no encryption either, …
It’s just shit.If it were the choice between mailinglist and discord, I wouldn’t take either and not communicate altogether. Fuck those both.
Edit: sorry, I really dislike IRC, mailinglists and discord. It’s fine if you do like mailinglists and IRC. You do you 👍
It always bewilders me to hear that some peasants adopted discord server out of all things for an open source project.
These aren’t well established where you can see the post was created in ’18. If they were established, you would seem them in the raw
CONTRIBUTING.md
. You can see folks having issues with using Discourse as a mailing list since it doesn’t quite work as expected & still requires review by someone with merge access to the primary repository. There is a SourceHut one that actually has some activity & I believe was once listed under the one of the contributing guides, but I can’t remember where it was listed. I doubt many maintainers are properly checking their email too despite listing them on themaintainer.nix
file. I would hedge to say that unless the community migrates away, you would see folks complaining the tread above about disliking that there is no pull requests with instead push to the default branch so we would asume all contributions in practices will be expected to be done thru MS GitHub. As it stands going thru the mailing list puts a lot of friction on everyone & wastes time of other maintainers that are expected to then raise a PR on your behalf for review. Say that PR does get merge on your behalf, now you want to follow it since it’s your patch… well too bad since MS GitHub has no way of subscribing to PR threads like it does some aspects of by adding.atom
to the end of a URL. As such, if you really want the in-practice option to not be under Microsoft’s domain, you’ll need to remove Microsoft from being the primary forge, relegating it to a mirror or dropping it outright.
Hoping to switch to Guix someday, but we’ll see.
I’m out of the loop, what’s the issue with the current Nixos maintainers?
Here’s a tl;dr : https://github.com/KFearsoff/nix-drama-explained
If you’re looking for a TL;DR of the situation, here it is:
- Nix community had a governance crisis for years. While there has been progress on building explicit teams to govern the project, it continued to fundamentally rely on implicit authority and soft power
- Eelco Dolstra, as one of the biggest holders of this implicit authority and soft power, has continuously abused this authority to push his decisions, and to block decisions that he doesn’t like
- Crucially, he also used his implicit authority to block any progress on solving this governance crisis and establishing systems with explicit authority
- This has led uncountably many people to burn out over the issue, and culminated in writing an open letter to have Eelco resign from all formal positions in the project and take a 6 month break from any involvement in the community
- Eelco wrote a response that largely dismisses the issues brought up, and advertises his company’s community as a substitute for Nix community
And a not too long read : https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2024-04-27-nix-internal-crisis.html
Thanks!
has continuously abused this authority to push his decisions, and to block decisions that he doesn’t like
Hmm. I’ve seen this before. It looks like the “sensationalist” crowd has issues with people who don’t go along with their sensationalism.
I’m not a Nix expert nor do I know the inner-workings of its management. I’ve just seen this so many times that I don’t expect more from people at this point.
It sucks when idiots group together to push smart people into doing their bidding. I respect those who resist it, though.
Finally!
This looks good, I’ll switch over as soon as they decided on a hoster. I don’t have too much experience working in open source projects, but I’ll try to contribute what I can
Ok, but why? Forking generally means you are unhappy with something but no one is saying what.
There’s been some controversy around the governance structure and culture with NixOS that has a number of people unhappy. I’m honestly not sure of the details but it’s ptesumably less about the software than the people.
ah, thanks mate.
I read somewhere that there was some drama about identity politics.
I was just thinking about switching to Nix, but I have no idea what to choose now.
You should learn the nix lang, flakes, zero to nix, etc and try not to get bogged down in the Nix/Aux stuff. Be prepared to wait for things to settle down on that side.
Just use Nix and see where the drama goes in a year. I’m guessing your configs will be fully compatible or only require minimal changes, if the forks survive that long in the first place.
I’d suggest learning nix, flakes, and home-manager before going anywhere close to NixOS. This should help you out
Don’t listen to @Shareni@programming.dev (sorry!) - the biggest issue right now is that package maintainers are leaving in droves - at least 15 contributors left a few days ago, a number which has likely increased these past few days - and will continue to increase. I think the only people left will be the ones who support Eelco and the toxic culture brewed by him.
What this means is that you risk your packages getting out of date, including slow delivery of security updates (which was already a concerning issue due to the way the Nixpigs build system worked). Worst case scenario, some (many?) packages may never even get an update.
So now’s definitely NOT a good time to switch, and in fact I’d also urge existing users to look at other distros, at least temporarily until this whole thing settles down.
I disagree with @Shareni@programming.dev (sorry!)
Don’t say sorry for making an actual argument, or are you some Canadian lol?
at least 15 contributors left a few days ago
According to this list there are 3470 maintainers. Were those 15 doing so much work to warrant calling it the end of days?
What this means is that you risk your packages getting out of date, including slow delivery of security updates
A possible delay for some package updates vs certainly outdated packages in my native Debian. Not really a choice IMO