Hey, I was wondering about the current status of the NixOS wiki.

From reading its history page and the linked issue discussions I gather that there was some rather unsavory history leading to it now being inofficial and operated outside of the NixOS project since 2016.

However, while the original plan when closing the original wiki seems to have been to move documentation from the wiki to the official manuals, that doesn't seem to have happened in any larger capacity in the years following the inofficialization. The wiki still seems to be the only place to have you-want-X-do-Y-instructions with usable snippets and stuff like that for most tasks.

E.g. I was just searching for setting up printers, and there's no mention of printing in the manuals, but there is a wiki page (which is where I would expect something like that anyway from my experience with other distros). Also, for a lot of search queries on Google etc. of the type "nixos how to X" the wiki will come up first, because the manuals don't have a lot of stuff like that. The wiki is probably the de facto landing page for a lot of newbies to NixOS (see also this post of mine). Or for another there's no mention of how to set up Docker or Podman, no mention in the manual that I could find, but there are wiki pages with convenient snippets.

Sadly, the wiki pages often are outdated or otherwise lacking, and I'd like to improve them. However, my problem is: is it a good idea to put effort in improving the wiki? Or am I wasting effort on a deprecated project that's not really part of the Nix documentation effort? And if the wiki is indeed supposed to be deprecated, are there plans to add more you-want-X-do-Y-instruction-stuff for NixOS to the manuals? Would my example of "how to set up a printer" be well-suited for the manuals and should I add something like that there? Or is it better suited for the wiki (like other distributions handle it), regardless of it being inofficial?

In short, I mainly want to know where I'd best focus my efforts if I want to start helping on improving docs for how to do stuff on NixOS. If anyone has any insights of the situation or maybe some links to where I can keep reading up on it, I'd appreciate it!

Nicolas Lenz: basically, https://nix.dev is what you're looking for. it's an official project (even though the website doesn't reflect that, and we should absolutely change that asap), and it's supported by the nix documentation team. it's intended to be the place for how-to's (among other things), which as you correctly point out, are out of scope for a manual.

if you want to contribute, you can just go ahead and file a PR, but you are also very welcome to ask questions here first, or hop on one of our meetings (in room desc)

Nicolas Lenz: basically, https://nix.dev is what you're looking for. it's an official project (even though the website doesn't reflect that, and we should absolutely change that asap), and it's maintained by the nix documentation team. it's intended to be the place for how-to's (among other things), which as you correctly point out, are out of scope for a manual.

if you want to contribute, you can just go ahead and file a PR, but you are also very welcome to ask questions here first, or hop on one of our meetings (in room desc)

fricklerhandwerk: do you know what's blocking us from making nix.dev look more official? Thinking of things like:

• copyright footer mentioning Domen Kožar
• style being different
• lack of link from nixos.org
• no mention of it being official in landing page

Okay, interesting, I've been to nix.dev before, but I didn't know it was official (due to the reasons you pointed out).

And also, if that's the place where something like "How to configure a printer" would belong, the title and the subtitle "An opinionated guide for developers getting things done using the Nix ecosystem." should probably also be changed, but I'm not quite sure to what? What exactly would it be, if it's neither the manual nor the wiki and what would it be called? "NixOS Guides"? What would a nixos.org subdomain be? guides.nixos.org?

In reply to @asymmetric:matrix.dapp.org.uk

fricklerhandwerk: do you know what's blocking us from making nix.dev look more official? Thinking of things like:

• copyright footer mentioning Domen Kožar
• style being different
• lack of link from nixos.org
• no mention of it being official in landing page

In reply to @asymmetric:matrix.dapp.org.uk

fricklerhandwerk: do you know what's blocking us from making nix.dev look more official? Thinking of things like:

• copyright footer mentioning Domen Kožar
• style being different
• lack of link from nixos.org
• no mention of it being official in landing page

In reply to @asymmetric:matrix.dapp.org.uk
so if there are blockers around copyright transfer of nix.dev, this could be a way to sidestep those entirely, and solve visiblity from homepage and pagerank issues as well

It's not exactly that simple. What we really need is a clearly distinct presentation for the different ecosystem components (Nix, Nixpkgs, NixOS, and possibly others), and one integrated user story.

Currently we have no maintainers for NixOS documentation, but ironically this is what most new users come from and end up confused. nixos.org contains very little technical information and is more of an organisational hub, at least judging from where the updates are happening. nix.dev is trying to do the integration.

More context: https://github.com/NixOS/nix.dev/issues/290

I think we do have a clear vision what needs to be done, but lack of resources and problems with coordination to actually do it.

In reply to @asymmetric:matrix.dapp.org.uk
so if there are blockers around copyright transfer of nix.dev, this could be a way to sidestep those entirely, and solve visiblity from homepage and pagerank issues as well

It's not exactly that simple. What we really need is a clearly distinct presentation for the different ecosystem components (Nix, Nixpkgs, NixOS, and possibly others), and one integrated user story.

Currently we have no maintainers for NixOS documentation, but ironically this is what most new users come from and end up confused with. nixos.org contains very little technical information and is more of an organisational hub, at least judging from where the updates are happening. nix.dev is trying to do the integration.

More context: https://github.com/NixOS/nix.dev/issues/290

I think we do have a clear vision what needs to be done, but lack of resources and problems with coordination to actually do it.

It's not exactly that simple. What we really need is a clearly distinct presentation for the different ecosystem components (Nix, Nixpkgs, NixOS, and possibly others), and one integrated user story.

Currently we have no maintainers for NixOS documentation, but ironically this is what most new users come for and end up confused with. nixos.org contains very little technical information and is more of an organisational hub, at least judging from where the updates are happening. nix.dev is trying to do the integration.

More context: https://github.com/NixOS/nix.dev/issues/290

I think we do have a clear vision what needs to be done, but lack of resources and problems with coordination to actually do it.

In reply to @fricklerhandwerk:matrix.org
We're waiting for the NixOS Foundation to receive ownership of copyright and the domain. Technical issues can be fixed quickly.

In reply to @eisfunke:eisfunke.com
And regarding my original question about "where to put 'how to set up printing' and other stuff that currently lives in the wiki" – I'm still a little confused, because looking over the current version of nix.dev something like that would look very much out of place there

In reply to @eisfunke:eisfunke.com
And regarding my original question about "where to put 'how to set up printing' and other stuff that currently lives in the wiki" – I'm still a little confused, because looking over the current version of nix.dev something like that would look very much out of place there

Where to migrate what:

    Nix interaction: nix manual

    Language-specific build instructions: nixpkgs manual

    Package, service, or hardware configuration: nixos manual

    Overviews, tutorials, guides, and best practices: nix.dev

https://nix.dev/contributing/documentation#wiki

In reply to @infinisil:matrix.org
Who's doing that, what's the status? This doesn't seem to have moved along at all within months

Domen Kožar and the foundation board have to do this. I know that Théophane has looked into it somewhat recently. But board members are extremely time-constrained and have lots of things on their plate.

ronef could you prioritise this? We’re running into this problem continuously, and it would unblock a lot of things we wanted to do for a long time now.

In reply to @domenkozar:matrix.org
transferred the domain yesterday and signed the copyright transfer about a month ago

Awesome! I didn’t even know. Did you publish it in the board meeting notes somewhere? Couldn’t find it.

asymmetric: Since that’s settled, please go ahead with the necessary updates.

I will bring these two old PRs up to date this week:

https://github.com/NixOS/nix.dev/pull/262

https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-homepage/pull/882