In reply to @tejing:matrix.org
every newbie and his brother is convinced everything under the sun "requires flakes"... I suspect because they're doing a lot of their learning from people who don't actually understand things themselves all that well, and only learned flakes

In reply to @tejing:matrix.org
I'll also mention this tidbit here in case others find it a little useful: We talk about the relationship between how nix manages files and how programming languages deal with pointers, but for some reason when it comes to explaining why we avoid well-known paths, nobody seems to make the comparison to avoiding global variables

Could it be, to some extent, because Nix's current tooling relies fairly heavily on things like environment variables?

I'm reminded of nix-shell/nix develop

In reply to @bzzm3r:matrix.org

Maybe? Not sure. I can't help but think I lost the thread while writing that message, and therefore, readers would have too. But if I were to try again, much more succinctly:

1. Automation is useful, and important, especially given the context we are in. Nix has peculiarities which make it difficult to document semi-automatically. Should these peculiarities be addressed directly first? Or should we "accept reality as it is", and merely paper over Nix?

2. For a beginner (speaking as a beginner), learning Nix is especially difficult not because the Nix docs don't have good SEO, or because there isn't enough documentation. It's because there is a ton of noise; some of it quite purposeful/intentional.

In reply to @olafklingt:matrix.org
I think most of the noise is not intentional. The difficult part of improving the documentation is not to add content but to make it more concise. So i basically agree with your observations.

In reply to @olafklingt:matrix.org
I think most of the noise is not intentional. The difficult part of improving the documentation is not to add content but to make it more concise. So i basically agree with your observations.

In reply to @olafklingt:matrix.org
I think most of the noise is not intentional. The difficult part of improving the documentation is not to add content but to make it more concise. So i basically agree with your observations.

In reply to @bzzm3r:matrix.org

But there is enough of an effort to delegitimize the current official docs (because they do not cover flakes, and because they refer to flakes as experimental features), that most newcomers (myself included) did not realize that flakes were entirely optional

instead, we saw the docs as entirely outdated

I for myself decided to see it this not worth to deal with. It is something one has to live with in a world with multiple opinions and unequal distribution of power.

Obviously it's unfortunate.

In reply to @fricklerhandwerk:matrix.org
And the reason we're circling around these issues are embedded in bzm3r's long introduction that started this exchange: as a group of developers working on the ecosystem, we lack focus and direction, and this is in part because there are so many rabbit holes. There are more problems to solve than hours available, and each of them is large enough to get frustrated and switch to something else. Therefore everything is notoriously unfinished.

Suppose you were to put on an imaginary despot's hat. Where would you direct efforts?

Would it still be on documentation?

If yes, then in that case, I found this recently: https://github.com/orgs/NixOS/projects/15/views/1

How can I find someone willing to prioritize tasks for me by assigning them to me? Could you do so?

In reply to @bzzm3r:matrix.org
Oh, I just ran into this today: https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/7981

In reply to @bzzm3r:matrix.org
Or...should I just re-write the nix-build CLI? 🤔