In reply to @zmitchell:matrix.org
You don’t think conditionals are an important part of the language? They’re one of the first things you learn in any language… 

Yes, conditionals are essential for programming. But they’re not special at all in the Nix language and - maybe important is not a good word, let’s say - particularly relevant for how it’s used in practice. As a beginner you will likely only see and work with purely declarative constructs. The introductory tutorial is absolutely not about computational reasoning, and definitely not about expressing anything in the language, but first and foremost about getting a first clue about what’s even going on.

We have to optimize for brevity and relevance, and I deem conditionals to be below the threshold for a first encounter. People are more likely to see map and filter than if … then … else in the wild. This is e.g. why builtins are mentioned, but not in any detail.

Ey, folks. Need some language custodians. In regards to services.fail2ban.bantime-increment.maxtime, the description says this:

"bantime.maxtime" is the max number of seconds using the ban time can reach (don't grows further)

I was thinking of doing a PR with this:

"bantime.maxtime" is the maximum limit of bantime in seconds (300), minutes (5m), hours (5h) for an IP, which cannot be exceded.

At first I thought "defined in seconds" , but even according to the example posed time can be measured using units as well.

Much better, however as a personal recommendation, I suggest using the list of times after each repeated failures, using something like bantime-increment.multipliers = "1 2 4 8 16 …";

I found that attackers would repeat their attack after a while once they notice that they are banned, and alternate between corrupted hosts.

Using multiplier following some exponential definitely help at getting rid of most repeated attempts.

In reply to @fricklerhandwerk:matrix.org
What I could really need help with is cleaning up the language reference in the Nix manual. It’s still mostly a long meandering wall of text that needs to be a lot more concise, needs more focused examples, and most importantly syntax patterns for all the constructs.