| 29 May 2023 |
 @piegames:matrix.org | Is the NAT one of the "blessed" Nix teams? (I remember seeing some Discourse announcements about making some teams more official entities than others, forgot the wording) | 11:43:22 |
 infinisil | In reply to @qyliss:fairydust.space
what if the NAT stops existing, or being active? Same thing when people stop contributing, escalate to ones with more power. | 11:44:09 |
 Alyssa Ross | but we can't do that if it's in an RFC | 11:44:40 |
| Alyssa Ross | we'd need a whole new RFC | 11:44:46 |
| infinisil | The NAT has existed for a while now already, and I'll make sure that it continues existing, and I trust the other members to continue the NAT in case I happen to have an accident or so. A team is at least much better than a single individual | 11:44:57 |
| Alyssa Ross | we've never had an RFC restrict who can change parts of Nixpkgs before | 11:45:16 |
| Alyssa Ross | nor has any problem that I'm aware of ever come up that suggests such a heavy handed restriction is necessary | 11:45:41 |
| infinisil | I think this is being blown out of proportion | 11:46:42 |
| infinisil | We're talking about situations where: The standard needs a small uncontroversial change, the NAT team does not exist anymore, there's enforced protection of changes to the standard | 11:47:57 |
| Alyssa Ross | RFCs are difficult to change later, so it's really important to get what goes into them right | 11:48:18 |
| infinisil | If the standard is controversial -> RFC; if the NAT does still exist -> just wait for approval; if there's no enforced protection -> just change the files, if the NAT doesn't exist anymore, nobody would complain | 11:48:58 |
| infinisil | And if all three are the case, talk to a NixOS org admin to remove the restriction | 11:49:56 |
| Alyssa Ross | oh I think we might be at crossed wires here | 11:50:08 |
| Alyssa Ross | piegames said "if you really want to then put that into the RFC" | 11:50:22 |
| Alyssa Ross | but I now notice you didn't actually mention putting this in the RFC | 11:50:30 |
| infinisil | In reply to @infinisil:matrix.org
Hmm, how about "This RFC describes the initial standard. The up-to-date standard will be in the Nixpkgs manual. Smaller changes to the standard may be performed by the Nixpkgs Architecture Team without an RFC, while larger changes will need another RFC" Alyssa Ross: This here | 11:50:50 |
| Alyssa Ross | Would "Smaller changes to the standard may be performed without an RFC" work for you? | 11:52:10 |
| @piegames:matrix.org | I'm struggling to imagine any changes that are "minor" in scope yet would be controversial enough to warrant a discussion with the NAT | 11:52:37 |
| infinisil | I think changes being uncontroversial means that the NAT will accept them, and them being uncontroversial the opposite | 11:53:19 |
| @piegames:matrix.org | Okay, then I'm struggling to imagine a minor but controversial change in this context | 11:53:53 |
| infinisil | Yeah that wouldn't exist then, any minor change would be accepted by the NAT | 11:54:18 |
| infinisil | In reply to @qyliss:fairydust.space
Would "Smaller changes to the standard may be performed without an RFC" work for you? So I think this wouldn't work for me, because I don't necessarily trust the ~200 committers of nixpkgs to be able to decide what a smaller/uncontroversial change to the standard is | 11:54:51 |
| Alyssa Ross | wouldn't CODEOWNERS etc and our existing social conventions be enough to enforce that? | 11:55:20 |
| infinisil | Yeah probably, I guess it's somewhat implicit | 11:55:58 |
| Alyssa Ross | like I'm not arguing the RFC should say "any committer is free to change how this works at any time" | 11:56:36 |
| infinisil | If the NAT is a codeowner, I'll get notified, and if it's an uncontroversial change and I'm not on vacation I'll accept it | 11:56:58 |
| Alyssa Ross | I'd expect people to wait for your input regardless of whether the RFC says they have to | 11:57:35 |
| Alyssa Ross | and if they don't, well, then we probably have a problem that's wider than just auto-called packages | 11:58:02 |
| infinisil | But then again, I don't think all of our 200 committers are aware of this RFC. It's easy to just randomly pick an RFC to review, decide that it looks trivial, and merge it | 11:58:31 |
| Alyssa Ross | people are generally able to respect soft ownership without needing to know whether an RFC exists | 11:59:40 |
