| 17 Jul 2023 |
 @brian:bmcgee.ie | I agree with the comment, if it's experimental, break it as necessary. As a flakes user I accept the churn, and I'll update as necessary. I know there will be a lot of people unhappy about any kind of breakage but I think this would be a valuable lesson as to why you don't let experimental features sit for long enough to become de facto use cases for a large chunk of people rather than stabilising them | 18:26:31 |
 infinisil | Yeah, that's gonna be really hard though, there's third-party products being built daily on top of experimental flakes without any care in the world (if only that kind of effort went into flakes stabilisation) | 18:27:48 |
| infinisil | I really like John Ericson's suggestions for what Nix should become here: https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/pull/136#discussion_r1246035453 | 18:29:15 |
 John Ericson | :) | 18:29:50 |
| John Ericson | I get that flakes have driven a lot of new usage, but that is just because everything else was so unpolished | 18:30:11 |
| John Ericson | the bar was so low | 18:30:15 |
| John Ericson | Flakes are a "fast food" that kinda tastes good to start but ultimately fails to truly solve any problems | 18:30:45 |
| John Ericson | We have to believe the choices are not just "Flakes" or "unpolished unusuable to non-experts" | 18:31:32 |
 asymmetric | In reply to @infinisil:matrix.org
This would also set a precedent that the docs team will document whatever ill-designed and barely-documented feature gets merged into Nix I agree with most of your other points, but this precedent has definitely already been set by stable nix+nixpkgs, at least the part about us having to ex post document barely-documented stuff | 18:32:23 |
| infinisil | We can't deny that Flakes does solve some problems. Though it also introduces a whole bunch of new problems along the way, problems which shouldn't be necessary | 18:32:36 |
| infinisil | In reply to @asymmetric:matrix.dapp.org.uk
I agree with most of your other points, but this precedent has definitely already been set by stable nix+nixpkgs, at least the part about us having to ex post document barely-documented stuff Hehe fair enough, would like to get away from that though :P | 18:33:17 |
| asymmetric | In reply to @Ericson2314:matrix.org
Flakes are a "fast food" that kinda tastes good to start but ultimately fails to truly solve any problems i think this is subjective. i really like flakes and for my usecases, they have almost completely replaced the stable tooling. but the other problems still stand, and it is factually still experimental, so I think we should focus on that, rather than value judgements | 18:33:32 |
| asymmetric | In reply to @Ericson2314:matrix.org
Flakes are a "fast food" that kinda tastes good to start but ultimately fails to truly solve any problems * i think this is subjective. i really like flakes and for my usecases, they have almost completely replaced the stable tooling. but the other problems still stand (missing feature parity), and it is factually still experimental, so I think we should focus on that, rather than value judgements | 18:33:50 |
| asymmetric | * i think this is subjective. i really like flakes and for my usecases, they have almost completely replaced the stable tooling. but the other problems still stand (e.g. missing feature parity), and it is factually still experimental, so I think we should focus on that, rather than value judgements | 18:34:42 |
| John Ericson | opinions are somewhat inevitable for writing tutorials not reference docs | 18:35:06 |
| John Ericson | the fact here is that flakes are unstable and unstable has to mean something | 18:35:23 |
