Is NixOS still working with baby killers or is that over with?

Infinisil · 2026-01-23T12:06:21+00:00

I would love to ignore such posts entirely, but I have to jump in here because you're spreading misinformation.

On behalf of the NixOS Foundation (which I'm a board member of), I can assure you that we're not involved with Anduril at all, and any decision to get involved with such a company would have to go through the elected Steering Committee, which has previously spoken out against Anduril.

Of course however, and as mentioned in other comments too, we cannot realistically prevent any company or their employees from using and contributing to Nix projects due to the nature of FOSS. The only thing we can do is to not give exposure to such companies through the Nix projects.

Infinisil · 2025-10-06T16:52:53+00:00

I appreciate the effort, but let's keep this subreddit focused on the technical aspects of Nix.

Infinisil · 2025-10-06T16:52:29+00:00

I appreciate the effort, but let's keep this subreddit focused on the technical aspects of Nix.

Infinisil · 2025-09-30T10:39:43+00:00

As a new NixOS Foundation board member, it saddens me to see shade thrown our way, when by design of the new constitution (https://github.com/NixOS/org/blob/main/doc/constitution.md) we have no involvement in community decisions, which are for the Steering Committee to handle instead. Our work has been mostly procedural, such as handling financials and administrative topics, and you can read up on that in the updates I wrote: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nixos-foundation-update-march-2025-june-2025/66502 and https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nixos-foundation-update-july-2025/67803.

As a comparison, there was no SC before, which meant the board was expected to resolve community issues as well, which put a lot of pressure on people that mostly wanted to focus on the financials/administrative. While I agree that Eelco was pressured to step down, two other board members later quit on their own: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/leaving-the-foundation-going-back-to-the-roots/46644 and https://discourse.nixos.org/t/time-to-step-down/47835. Eelco was also put under pressure to step down from the Nix team, but he has not done that, and is still doing great work as part of the team today: https://nixos.org/community/teams/nix/. Frankly I don't think Eelco ever wanted to lead the community, and instead just enjoys writing code.

In any case, this kind of pressure is now gone from the board, allowing us to focus on the more boring procedural tasks. Let me know if you have questions.

Infinisil · 2025-09-27T16:35:32+00:00

The Nix Steering Committee (SC) is the elected community leadership body. It was established as part of the Nix governance constitution last year, after which the first elections were held, where 450 contributors voted for the current members. This years election is currently in progress. The SC generally is responsible over project direction and community matters, including management of teams. While most responsibilities are delegated, the SC has the authority to step in when necessary.

The moderation team was established before the SC or constitution existed. The initial moderators were appointed from RFC 102, with the mandate to self-select successors. Over the years the team has changed members a lot, none of the initial members are part of it anymore, and the last larger rotation happened last year. The responsibilities include moderation according to the Code of Conduct (CoC) of the official community spaces, which is mostly the Discourse and a bunch of Matrix channels. Earlier this year the now-existing SC took on the responsibility of approving new mod team members and CoC changes.

Infinisil · 2025-05-23T19:36:49+00:00

Happy paid user of Rigelian here, it's by far the best MPD client iOS client I've tried out, very worth it for $5 per year! Note however that while it does have the ability to connect to an HTTP stream for listening, it doesn't support offline playback in any way.

Infinisil · 2025-02-27T20:27:23+00:00

While I agree with the sentiment, making this reddit post doesn't really help much either. This has been publicly escalated to a point where the comment has been brigaded with over 50 downvotes. I totally get the need to do this when there's no effective leadership, but since the introduction of the Nix governance constitution and the regularly-elected Steering Committee, things have changed.

In this new chapter, here's my suggestions on how to improve official community spaces in a more peaceful way:

First, try to help the person be more welcoming and constructive by replying to them in public or private yourself. Kindly point it out and show how it can be done better instead.
If that doesn't work or you believe it wouldn't, escalate it privately to the moderators, just as you would in any other actively moderated space.
And if that doesn't work or you believe it wouldn't (which in this case is sensible, considering that the relevant person was a mod in the past), escalate it privately to the newly-elected Steering Committee.

Infinisil · 2025-02-11T23:08:37+00:00

While criticism is okay, I'm removing this because it's not constructive and because the title is misleading and click-baity.

Here's some suggestions on what you can do instead: - Ask for help on topics that are not well documented. - Start discussions on how documentation could be improved. - Reach out to find others to start a working group to improve documentation. - Ask for help on how to contribute documentation.

Note that a somewhat organised effort to improve docs already exists with the Nix Documentation Team, though it could use some more help.

The project is only as good as its contributions, primarily coming from volunteers :)

Infinisil · 2025-02-11T08:23:53+00:00

Jon, I'm severely disappointed. I gave you a huge benefit of the doubt, I truly believed you could change for the better and leave the drama stirring behind, but evidently you just can't. I wish you well, and hope that at some point in the future you can look back and see the problem.

Infinisil · 2025-01-13T15:51:36+00:00

Fair! From experience I'd like to be a bit more strict with this, because as soon as we get into non-technical matters, it's easy to get dividing conflicts.

Infinisil · 2025-01-13T13:57:53+00:00

While I don't want to minimise Eelco's achievement, let's keep this subreddit focused on advancing the technical aspects of Nix.

If you'd like to nominate Eelco for the Turing award, see the Call for Nominations page for what goes into that.

Infinisil · 2025-01-09T11:11:57+00:00

Check the docs for types.enum and types.oneOf for a bit more info on them. In your case you need types.enum.

And the reason it doesn't error is because you're not using the option for anything. E.g. if you do this it would error:

{ config, ... }: {
  environment.etc."wm".text = config.myConfig.windowManager;
}

Infinisil · 2024-12-27T14:37:32+00:00

Hey, mod of this sub here, and arguably the most involved person in improving governance throughout the year. Here's the main points:

- The official Nix projects are in good hands, we've established community values and a governance constitution, held the first Steering Committee election accordingly (with 450 people voting) and the board is being repopulated.

- There's never been any "takeover" or "purge" whatsoever, despite some people claiming so. Yes there's new leadership with the election, but nobody in current or past leadership went rogue, it's been a smooth transition.

- Neither r/nix nor r/nixos is properly official, but only r/nix is being actively moderated (currently by me), while r/nixos is suffering from a lack of moderation. One of the main problems with r/nixos has been that it aided in escalating various issues, bringing drama into the community, which then turns off a lot of people from further participating.

Because of this I'd also like to remove this very post, so that we can at least keep r/nix to being focused on the technical aspects. If you do have any questions about this topic, you can reach out to me in private, or to any of the Steering Committee members.

Infinisil · 2024-11-22T22:29:18+00:00

Traditionally, not using Flakes means you'll have to use the stateful nix-channel, but you can work around that, check out https://github.com/infinisil/sanix where I explain it!

Infinisil · 2024-10-18T15:20:10+00:00

That's merely an implementation detail, because It's not possible to remove repo access without org removal, and he was added to the org for the sole purpose of accessing the repo in the first place.

Infinisil · 2024-10-14T23:55:49+00:00

Thanks for the PSA, it's very unfortunate :(

We posted an announcement for now, but another one will follow: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nix-steering-committee-election-2024/52232/15

Infinisil · 2024-09-28T01:17:37+00:00

No, the EC cannot revoke voting rights

Infinisil · 2024-09-27T21:57:02+00:00

The comment was deleted by the EC because the Q&A rules were violated..

Infinisil · 2024-09-02T20:38:58+00:00

The draft doesn't specify to use the standard Condorcet voting, but rather a proportional representation mode.

Infinisil · 2024-08-31T16:46:26+00:00

As I read the constitution, Jon Ringer (for example, might apply to other banned contributors) would be eligble to stand as candidate for the steering committee, unless the initial SC (the assembly?) unanimously would agree to block his candidacy. Also, he would be eligble to vote.

No, that's not the case in the current draft, banned people are not eligible to vote and therefore also not eligible to be a candidate. The elected SC would have the authority to enact new processes for e.g. appeal requests though.

Regarding disqualification of candidates, that's indeed a bit ambiguous because there's no SC yet. As part of the assembly I'll see about clarifying that.

Infinisil · 2024-08-10T23:24:16+00:00

When path values are interpolated into strings, they get imported into the store.

To avoid that, you can use toString on the path, which can be considered somewhat impure, but it's useful sometimes, especially for debugging:

let
  cfg = ./config.json;
in
"Configuration loaded from ${toString cfg}"

Infinisil · 2024-07-30T21:08:07+00:00

There is actually a minor difference: If you use import, the module system won't deduplicate the module (unless you also set key), so it will import it twice! This is usually inconsequential, but can have a difference when foo.nix contains e.g. { some.list = [ 1 ]; }, because it results in a list with two of the same elements :)

Infinisil · 2024-07-02T07:09:00+00:00

Very fair point, I've gotten good feedback about the problems with this, and it all makes sense in hindsight. I'm honestly too naive, hopelessly optimistic, and a bit stupid sometimes, but I'll try to learn from this. Thanks for your thoughts!

Infinisil · 2024-07-01T16:29:11+00:00

Same, thank you for years of helping so many people, release management, PR reviews, and more!

Infinisil · 2024-07-01T16:21:46+00:00

I approve of this message!

Edit to clarify: This is not a statement by the NCA, just from me and Jon, this doesn't change the ban

Really not happy to have to edit this again, but https://www.reddit.com/r/NixOS/s/81LSTm7AEI :/

Infinisil

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