A typical passed RFC looks like a search for a least-disliked outcome

It could mean as well that the RFC process or other processes in place cause people to dis-align and are dysfunctional to some extent.

I find it hard to take the impossibility of a shared vision and shared goal to be the ultimate conclusion. It would seem to me that all collaborative social interaction would break down entirely at this point.

So if collaborative social interaction exists, and there is a lot of that in nixpkgs every day, then some people at least align some of the time with other people in goal and vision.

Which raises the question what causes them to dis-align in some cases so that these interactions become a "search for a least-disliked outcome".

So I am with tomberek on this I guess. I am more optimistic about the possibility of shared goals. Dysfunctional processes in place might make it harder of course.

I think any claim that a goal can unify should come with an explanation where such an optimistic view comes from

I think I somewhat gave one: without the possibility of shared goals at least on a limited basis, how can you have collaborative social interaction? And if it is only to fix a package together that you use on a daily basis but is broken after a change upstream... that's a shared goal already.

It would seem to me that all collaborative social interaction would break down entirely at this point.

This is an unfounded conclusion. Ideally, for each change there are some people who are interested in it, and many others — maybe many more — for whom the change is useless, but whatever no harm from it.

Unfortunately, this ideal is not achievable and the changes will have negative impact on people who see no benefit, but we try to reduce such impacts, so that sharing the useful parts of this ball of questionable trade-offs is still preferable to splitting.

I don't think my "conclusion" is unfounded at all. You went very far before, basically denying all goal-alignment between people even on a local level. And I think there is just no evidence for that. So I wanted to call that into question.

But this doesn't need goals to be widely shared, much less near-uniformly

That is a different story, yes. On which level do the goals have to be shared? Local, somewhere in the middle, or global?

Maybe we should focus on this issue, and not dispute that people can have shared goals and also do from time to time collaborate. Because I think it is fairly obviously true that human beings are on average social enough to be able to coordinate their actions to some extent.

sharing the useful parts of this ball of questionable trade-offs is still preferable to splitting.

But that depends crucially on how the comparison actually is between the trade-offs and splitting to you in particular.

And that again depends on your goals. Because stuff is only better or worse in relation to some goal.

And in a way this clarification of what goals people have in mind was what tomberek wanted to hear initially as a starting point: "Please consider the goals you personally have for Nix"

That is what he said.

Discussions about governance will meander if we cannot be clear on what goals that governance should be aiming for.

«goals that governance should be aiming for» is something project-scale

Which raises the question what causes them to dis-align in some cases so that these interactions become a "search for a least-disliked outcome".

And also this — this is not disalignment, RFCs figure out time and time again that not everyone sees the proposed changes as useful, so the changes need to be made less harmful at least.

Perhaps they are focusing on the wrong things, how would we know?

They are. And they are not. Whatever they are doing are right things for them and wrong things for someone else. Just not wrong enough to actively oppose.

Nixpkgs commits to two NixOS releases each year.

And just to make a point, the releases are a small pure negative in terms of what I use from the project. This is sincere. I just know people actually care about releases existing, and not always mistakenly, so whatever.

not expect project-level things to get done/prioritized

They can get done — if a committed enough team of people who do wnat them can convince the others these things are not too harmful, and then carry out the task.

They can get done — if a committed enough team of people who do wnat them can convince the others these things are not too harmful

Which, to reiterate my earlier point, in practice might just mean that nothing can get done because of a lack of higher level goals and a lack of decision making processes that would implement them in case of lack of consensus. So concretely, if you find enough people to make a decent initiative appear very harmful, everything just stalls. This approach appears to me to have a strong tendency to lead to extreme risk aversion since people have a tendency to confuse apparent risk with harm sadly.

Which I think is a shame.