Hello community,

Is there a kind of roadmap for the documentation?

Or a place that is the most in need of updating?

Kind regards

There is no simple answer for this. The answer will be different depending who you ask, and what scope you set.

My personal answer would be:

The documentation - especially the handbooks for nix/nixpkgs and the documentation in search.nixos.org for packages/options and installation and usage procedures are good enough for people who like to read and write code to get a sufficiant understanding of nix and the ecosystem.

In my personal view the documentation is lacking for the „non-coder/linux users but also administrators“ und NixOS - and there https://wiki.nixos.org needs some low level documentation and there are some low hanging fruits, what can be done to improve the situation (documentation about desktop programs and their configuration via simple configuration.nix commands. If you just use your desktop for (office) work and have some small scale servers (maybe a VM-Host and some VMs on it), you may not need Flakes, Homemanager, a deep understanding of nix language, the ability to package for nixpkgs, setup Hydra, do remote builds, have a complex configuration system etc.
But these users need more information about typical desktop and server programs, how to configure it (with full and explained examples), maybe to setup the servers (how to setup an hedgedoc instance for myself and make it safe with .htaccess authentification), or „how to install firefox including some common plugins and some privacy configuration“.

The long-term goal would be: Find a way to include these examples and better documentation for options in nixpkgs itself, in a way that it can be autogenerated in manuals and included in the search results from sites like search.nixos.org.

Thank you for the comprehensive reply.

First, there seems to be multiple different sources of nix documentation. (as shown above)

What is this groups stance on these? It seems to me that we should try to establish a single source of truth for the documentation as the first thing?

In reply to @brunbjerg:matrix.org

Thank you for the comprehensive reply.

First, there seems to be multiple different sources of nix documentation. (as shown above)

What is this groups stance on these? It seems to me that we should try to establish a single source of truth for the documentation as the first thing?

I think I will need some help to get started then.

I have only used nix for creating reproducible devShells across different repos. A friend asked which distro he should use for a server and I thought that it is a shame that I could not recommend NixOS over Ubuntu given the trouble I had myself.

I have mostly written documentation as markdown above function and class definitions and READMEs

When you talk about documentation, do mean the:

• man configuration.nix?
• the info that you can get on individual packages on search.nixos.org?
• The wikis?