Forking shirtballs!

Here’s a tl;dr : https://github.com/KFearsoff/nix-drama-explained

If you’re looking for a TL;DR of the situation, here it is:

• Nix community had a governance crisis for years. While there has been progress on building explicit teams to govern the project, it continued to fundamentally rely on implicit authority and soft power
• Eelco Dolstra, as one of the biggest holders of this implicit authority and soft power, has continuously abused this authority to push his decisions, and to block decisions that he doesn’t like
• Crucially, he also used his implicit authority to block any progress on solving this governance crisis and establishing systems with explicit authority

• This has led uncountably many people to burn out over the issue, and culminated in writing an open letter to have Eelco resign from all formal positions in the project and take a 6 month break from any involvement in the community

• Eelco wrote a response that largely dismisses the issues brought up, and advertises his company’s community as a substitute for Nix community

And a not too long read : https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2024-04-27-nix-internal-crisis.html

Aux is more similar to Nix, than Guix is.

Guix uses the same concepts, but still is very different.

https://forgejo.org/compare-to-gitea/

I dunno, some of these are a pretty big deal, in particular:

Gitea repeatedly makes choices that leave Gitea admins exposed to known vulnerabilities during extended periods of time. For instance Gitea spent resources to undergo a SOC2 security audit for its SaaS offering while critical vulnerabilities demanded a new release. Advance notice of security releases is for customers only.

Gitea is developed on github, whereas forgejo is developed on and by codeberg, who use it as their main forge (also mentioned on that page). Someone dogfooding gives me more confidence in the software.

I think the reason is because apparently a lot of people are unhappy with a deal Nix inked apparently with a company that does business with the US’ Immigrations and Customs

I like #Nix, I do not like what has happened to it.

With no explanation of what happened, the conclusion is almost certainly Internal politics.

It seems like forgejo split from gitea because it looked like gitea was going the route of gitlab. Idk if NixOS is going to commercialize though. Based on recent gossip it sounds like they’re overly adverse to commercialization. IE banning people for having DoD connections. Aux’s talk about special interest groups makes it sound like they’re going embrace that like redhat.

They are very diverged projects, but share the same philosophy. The Nix packages themselves aren’t the problem, its the organization backing them. So this fork is attempting to create better governance and organization, so that the good underlying tech can keep going and progress.

For example, Flakes have been held back from truly flourishing because the governing body has purposefully held back changes to those systems for nontechnical problems, but rather political conflicts with their proprietary offerings.

Think of the fork the same way we had the Alma/Rocky forks off of CentOS. Its political rather than technical, so keeping the same base tech helps adoption. Over time we can improve or replace parts of the ecosystem as the needs of this new project grow.

I disagree with @Shareni@programming.dev (sorry!) - the biggest issue right now is that package maintainers are leaving in droves - at least 15 contributors left a few days ago, a number which has likely increased these past few days - and will continue to increase. I think the only people left will be the ones who support Eelco and the toxic culture brewed by him.

What this means is that you risk your packages getting out of date, including slow delivery of security updates (which was already an increasing concern, due to the way the Nixpkgs build system worked). Worst case scenario, some (many?) packages may never even get an update.

So now’s definitely NOT a good time to switch, and in fact I’d also urge existing users to look at other distros, at least temporarily until this whole thing settles down.

https://github.com/KFearsoff/nix-drama-explained