[Nix-dev] Anarchy

[Bryce L Nordgren]

On Wed, Jun 27, 2012 at 6:02 AM, Michael Weiss <wm at borasi.de> wrote:

> Greetings,
>
> I'd like to derail the discussion about policy and focus on the parts
> about how to reduce the need to agree on policy. As others have pointed
> out, nix is great for having your own cake and I want to know how to
> make the most of it.
>

This part here is what I'd really like to focus on. I think it's too early
to propose specific technical solutions such as a global namespace
convention. Backing up a step, I think the main point is to find a way to
structure the Nix community so that more stakeholders can have their needs
met without imposing their solutions on others. Conversely, stakeholders
want to be able to maximize the amount of other people's work they can
reuse.

I doodled a "desired future condition" on the wiki (with a picture). The
stakeholders are explicitly identified, along with their probable
perspective on the situation. Feel free to discuss it here or edit it
there. In any case, I think it would go much smoother if we limit the
discussion to how these stakeholders come together to form a community, and
avoid what specific tooling is required.

Fundamentally, this means a transition from a centralized collection of
packages to a distributed set of packages, each one  maintained by a
concerned stakeholder. To avoid some of the technical problems Marc brought
up, one could envision forming the expectation that stakeholders provide
some sort of stability guarantee (i.e., we promise not to change the name
of the package; or we'll publish our set of nix expressions as a versioned
"release" which can be downloaded to your nix store). I think these kind of
high level expectations placed on the humans can go a long way to making
the technical solutions more tractable.

https://nixos.org/wiki/The_Many_Cooks_Method

Bryce
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