[Nix-dev] Announcing free-nix: the free Linux distribution based on the Nix package manager

[Andres Loeh]

Hi Peter.

> where exactly could anyone bring anything up so that "people" change
> NixOS policy?
>
> Who exactly has the ability to change NixOS policy?

It's vaguely defined. But even if Eelco has in practice most of the
power, it's still in fact a community project, as can be observed by
the fact that if we'd all run away and do our own thing, Eelco would
probably not be able to maintain it all alone, whereas we'd likely
fail as well without him.

> What exactly *is* NixOS's policy?

Also not clearly defined, but so far, it seems to have been
functioning reasonably well without people feeling the need to fork.

> Eelco revoked all access of all regular contributors without prior
> warning. Until it suddenly happened, there was not the slightest
> indication that we would be losing access to the infrastructure that we
> have helped build over the last couple of years. Is that in your opinion
> the proper way to handle a community project?

You should not be so impatient here. Eelco has after years and years
of complaints from people decided to switch stuff over to git. That
should make most of us happy, shouldn't it? The transition has mostly
been extremely painless. Now, Eelco has made a questionable initial
decision about commit access. You can complain about that, but I think
it's much more worthwhile to make him understand that he's wrong on
this particular decision than to use it as an incentive to split the
community.

>  > I could somehow understand it if your decision was perceived by me as
>  > the outcome of a failed attempt of convincing the project to go in
>  > this direction, but afaics, you haven't even tried.
>
> You shouldn't jump to conclusions. I have expressed my dissatisfaction
> with Eelco's nontransparent decisions to him in private e-mail. However,
> he brushed me off, and told me that I don't need commit rights to NixOS
> because we have a distributed VCS now, so I can commit wherever I want
> instead of being restricted to his repository. Go figure.

Alright. Several of us have had this discussion, I guess. And there's
been a thread on the mailing list, too. My impression was always that
Eelco had this opinion that we could all commit and send pull
requests, but that he never indicated that he couldn't be convinced.
On the contrary, I remember several occasions on which Eelco has
indicated already that the current restrictions are preliminary, and
that he's likely to move to a hybrid model.

I still feel that just forking already is overreacting.

Cheers,
  Andres