In reply to @proofconstruction:matrix.org

... the goal of teaching newcomers is an anti-goal for you

Teaching newcomers to contribute is my goal, at this point. You can convince yourself of this by checking my more recent (albeit some months ago due to significant life changes) contributions, particularly in the "packaging existing software" tutorial and the draft Nixpkgs contribution tutorial that follows (PR 696 could use your help!).

I agree that this is super important too, because it was definitely a struggle for me to figure this out. I would be very happy to have a look at PR 696 and leave a review.

I also benefited from using nix-init (just to check out what it generates in order to help me learn Nix packaging patterns, or to use what it generates as a template for further extension)...and was quite disappointed I discovered that rather indirectly (someone was nice enough to tell me about it here when I was struggling to package something).

So, when I see that mentioned by zmitchell as something you might consider inserting in #696, I heartily agree!

In reply to @proofconstruction:matrix.org

... the goal of teaching newcomers is an anti-goal for you

Teaching newcomers to contribute is my goal, at this point. You can convince yourself of this by checking my more recent (albeit some months ago due to significant life changes) contributions, particularly in the "packaging existing software" tutorial and the draft Nixpkgs contribution tutorial that follows (PR 696 could use your help!).

I agree that this is super important too, because it was definitely a struggle for me to figure this out. I would be very happy to have a look at PR 696 and leave a review (edit: I did just finish doing that!)

I also benefited from using nix-init (just to check out what it generates in order to help me learn Nix packaging patterns, or to use what it generates as a template for further extension)...and was quite disappointed I discovered that rather indirectly (someone was nice enough to tell me about it here when I was struggling to package something).

So, when I see that mentioned by zmitchell as something you might consider inserting in #696, I heartily agree!

In reply to @proofconstruction:matrix.org

... telling me to "fudge off"

Not at all, in fact I welcome any new energy to this corner of the project -- I would be thrilled for you to join and help us! Just, the unofficial wiki is precisely the place where one can make wiki-style contributions. Now speaking for others: we see no reason to duplicate that effort, and instead focus on producing what we believe to be higher quality (in particular, more narratively-consistent) materials, like today's nix.dev.

I am inspired to suggest an alternative to the whole wiki thing, after reading PR#696.

I guess I'm wondering: why don't we just hit the accept button on the decent suggestions made by infinisil and zmitchell, and then just merge the darn thing? It's really good enough as is! It shouldn't have stayed as long as it has in PR review mode...and I think that's what I crave the most when I ask for a wiki.

I know how much my perfectionism gets in the way of getting something completed (or even started), and recently circumstances in life have forced me to accept that "it feels better to just not care"...surprisingly, this made me more productive, not less...

Wiki has a culture that enables that, but maybe it's a silly excuse to want to wait for a wiki to solve our problem there, when we could just....merge things faster 😅