[Nix-dev] Improving the Developer Experience in the Nix Community

[Shea Levy]

For me, the two biggest issues I see are:

	a) Lack of clear documentation of policy. The closest thing we have is the nixpkgs manual, but it's not enough. As a newcomer to a project (and even sometimes as a veteran), I want to be able to easily find answers to questions like "how should I format my code?", "should I submit a patch or a pull request?", "how do I find out who is the person in charge of the bits I'm touching?", "I have commit access and have made a big change in a branch, how long should I wait after announcing to merge it?", etc. Of course, documentation is frustrating to write, always incomplete, and time-consuming to keep up-to-date, but I think in the long run that effort will be worth it. I'd be more than happy to write up the docs if I could get some measure of assurance that those with the authority to approve such documents will be willing to answer questions I might have about what our policy actually is :)

	b) Lack of a way to ensure that issues/contributions/etc. come to some form of a resolution. Resolution could be "we'll never take this" or "it needs improvement" or "merged" or "we see the problem but don't have time to fix it ourselves" or any other number of things, I just want there to be some level of assurance that if I put the ball in someone else's court it will come back to me. "no reply is no OK" might work for this, but there have been some times where it's taken weeks to get a reply so there's no clear sense of when the final "no" has been delivered. I think one solution to this is to divide the 'responsibility of response' for the various aspects of the NixOS projects to those who have proven their ability and interest in that area, somewhat akin to Linux's maintainers. Those accepting such responsibility would be committing to looking for and responding (or delegating that someone else respond) to requests in their field in a timely manner (a few days I think), and such responsibility would be reassigned after several lapses in response. I think the more divided up this is the easier it will be for everyone involved, but that requires trusting more and more people with the keys to various parts of the kingdom. There are numerous reasonable hierarchies that could be put into place here, and I imagine each individual with some level of responsibility would be allowed to subdivide it himself how he wants. I'd be happy to facilitate the dividing (looking through commit histories and suggesting people to be in charge of various areas) and take on my share of the response responsibility, again assuming some level of assurance that those with the ability to actually enact this idea will be willing to take part in the conversation.

Cheers,
Shea

On Jun 26, 2012, at 10:26 AM, Shea Levy <shea at shealevy.com> wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> It seems apparent to me that many in the community have some level of dissatisfaction with how contributions to the various nix projects are handled. Sometimes the only solution to problems like this is a fork (as Peter seems to believe), but I think there is a good chance that things can be improved without fracturing the already-small group. I think three things are necessary for this to happen (I apologize for the formatting, I don't have access to a well-featured mail app right now):
> 
>    a) Those who have concerns need to explicitly bring them up in a way aimed toward fixing the problem while taking into account the reasons it happened in the first place, rather than trying to place blame. Particularly important here is that people recognize that any change will have a cost and that different people in the project will have different opinions on the relative weighting of the costs and benefits.
> 
>    b) Those who propose alternatives need to be willing to step up and do the work necessary to implement those alternatives themselves. For example, if you think too many emails to the list get dropped with no response, you need to be willing to respond to as many of the emails as possible.
> 
>    c) Those with the authority to do so need to be willing to make a) and b) possible. This doesn't mean anyone who requests permission to make a change in how things are done should automatically be given such permission, but that any such request needs to at least get some form of consideration from someone who has the ability to grant it.
> 
> Obviously only a few people have control over c), but the rest of us can and should freely do a) and b). So please, if you have concerns respond in this thread. Let's try to build the experience we want. I will reply myself with my own particular concerns.
> 
> Cheers,
> Shea
> _______________________________________________
> nix-dev mailing list
> nix-dev at lists.science.uu.nl
> http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev