[Nix-dev] Fwd: Why having releases if you break things in it often

[Tomasz Czyż]

I'm not sure if that's a troll or not, but let's try:

So any help would be nice. I am a technicaly shurly keen guy, but I cant
> reboot daily my machine for months, cause nobody of you experts can
> invest 5-15 mins to fix that.
>
But you know, experts stuff is pretty expensive resource, and maybe people
decided will be better if they use it differently than you would expect?

>
>
> I dont want to be a 100% full time nixos developer / sysadmin just to
> solve such stupid problem. Except somebody would pay me for that, then I
> would think about it.
>
Ah, so you won't do it for free but you expect the army of experts to rush
for help and do it for free for you, do I read that correctly?

>
> Is that really what I have to expect?
>
:-)

>
> Sorry for ranting here, I stopp now, but maybe some of that feedback
> helps you to improve something, and maybe somebody could give me some
> config lines or nix-env commands that gets flexget running again.
>
I can improve, but you know... if you would pay me, than I would think
about it.
Sorry, just kidding :-)

And now serious,
nix is an effort of huge number of people, they contribute in their free
time mostly, and even those who do it for cash, mostly work for some
companies and nixos contribution is just side effect of their work. It
looks like a lot of people think that nixos is so useful for their work
they contribute to it and even help others. You can join to that movement
and spend a lot of time learning about this open source project or you can
use the company to help you. Few people started nixos consulting (me as
well :-) and this is a second option, you pay for product/service. It's
like most of the open source software, right?


> Graham Christensen <graham at grahamc.com> writes:
>
> > I'm very sorry you've had a bad experience with breakage on stable. :( I
> > use 16.09 myself.
> >
> >>> yes I think that html5lib thing would it be. So it was at least a
> >>> security fix, so you dont just update stuff to update it, which would
> >>> make releases pretty useless concept :)
> >
> > Roughly, this is why backports happen:
> >
> >  - Security patches which aren't major updates
> >  - If a security patch is a major upgrade, try and find patches to our
> >    current version which accomplish the same goal. Apply the major
> >    update to master, and the patches to stable.
> >  - Bug fixes to applications which, again, aren't major updates.
> >    Generally be cautious about these.
> >  - Any updates when the current stable version is utterly broken. A key
> >    example of this is Spotify, who regularly breaks their old versions.
> >  - Extremely security-sensitive software, in particular Chrome,
> >    Chromium, Firefox, Thunderbird, and of course the kernel.
> >
> >>> Sorry I formulated that message a bit trollish, but just wanted to
> learn
> >>> why how releases are done in nixos.
> >
> > Please know that Freddy, Franz, Robin, Domen, myself, and the rest of
> > the people contributing to NixOS work very hard to keep the stable
> > version of NixOS working nicely. This is very important to us.
> >
> > It can be very stressful when preparing to backport changes, but it is
> > important to do them anyway. I try to think through impact and run tests
> > across a wide range of software to see what will break. We also try not
> > to backport any substantial changes, but instead smaller patches to
> > prevent breakage.
> >
> > When you do find breakage, please do promptly open an issue on send a
> > report on the mailing list so we can address the problem and perhaps add
> > testing to prevent it in the future. We're also quite accessible on the
> > #nixos IRC channel on Freenode.
> >
> > If you would like to take part in the process of identifying and solving
> > security problems on master and backporting to stable, we sure would
> > love the extra help -- feel free to comment on
> > https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/21967 and I'll tag you on
> > Wednesday when I open the next roundup.
> >
> > Best,
> > Graham Christensen
>
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>



-- 
Tomasz Czyż



-- 
Tomasz Czyż
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