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

[Shea Levy]

Hi Petr,

On Jun 27, 2012, at 10:32 AM, Petr Rockai <me at mornfall.net> wrote:

> Hi folks,
> 
> Shea Levy <shea at shealevy.com> writes:
>> That's why I opened this thread, because we have people with different
>> values but no one is really coming out and saying "this is what I
>> want, this is why what's here now is bad".
> 
> I am more or less a bystander and not really active, but this caught my
> attention (and the thread above).

Thanks for putting your 2 cents in.

> Above all, the main reason I am not
> active is that it seems that submitting patches is a hit-or-miss
> affair. They tend to get blackholed about as often as not. So I don't
> submit any: I just locally fork any package that I need to change, and
> in addition I keep a number of extra packages that way; basically, I
> maintain a private overlay in /etc/nixos.
> 
> Now if there was a simple and documented way to submit patches
> (*especially* new packages) that would actually work, it would probably
> make my life easier, even as a bystander, by reducing the size of the
> overlay significantly.
> 

Heh, this seems like what I'm dealing with with the issues I posted. I'm making it a priority to determine and document our policies and to create more reliable communication/contribution channels. I can't promise anything since ultimately others will need to actually enact anything I come up with, but I'll do my best to help improve this situation.

> Btw., I am planning a not entirely small deployment of NixOS later this
> week, so I would really like to hear something positive about
> sustainability. (Well, there's still time to call it off and stick to
> Debian, although I do like NixOS more on general principles.)
> 

What do you mean by sustainability here?

> Yours,
>   Petr
> 
> -- 
> id' Ash = Ash; id' Dust = Dust; id' _ = undefined

Cheers,
Shea