| 7 Jan 2026 |
 eveeifyeve | can you put a summary of the details in the licencing pr so I can link back to it? | 16:38:17 |
|  Matthew Hiles joined the room. | 17:23:17 |
 emily | I don't have time to author stuff about this as it's not a priority for me, sorry. I'm just explaining what would make sense to me from a review PoV | 18:29:56 |
 Randy Eckenrode | Does the Foundation have access to legal resources? This is an area where if we probably want someone with the appropriate knowledge and experience to advise us on what to do. | 18:32:04 |
| Randy Eckenrode | * | 18:32:17 |
| Randy Eckenrode | This is an area where if we probably want someone with the appropriate knowledge and experience to advise us on what to do. | 18:32:20 |
| Randy Eckenrode | * | 18:32:35 |
| Randy Eckenrode | * | 18:32:48 |
| Randy Eckenrode | * | 18:32:58 |
| Randy Eckenrode | The fact we are trying to use only the headers and stubs for interoperability purposes makes this not straightforward to interpret. Or maybe it does, but I’m not a lawyer. I’m just following the historical practice in nixpkgs regarding the SDK. | 18:34:40 |
| Randy Eckenrode | * | 18:34:56 |
| emily | I believe we (Nixpkgs core team) asked but I forget if we got a response. probably worth following up about at some point | 18:40:25 |
| emily | having a FOSS licensing lawyer on retainer would be great for sure | 18:40:33 |
| 8 Jan 2026 |
 Arian | I have contacts if we need a FOSS lawyer | 08:21:35 |
| Arian | But I'm pretty sure Foundation has access to legal through both NLNet and STF? | 08:26:27 |
| Arian | Iirc | 08:26:31 |
 markus.lohmayer | Not sure if this is a good place to ask, but let me try please. I am an admin using Nix for some years now on macOS, Ubuntu Linux, and NixOS. I am also using flakes like home-manager, nix-darwin, nixvim, etc.
While nixpkgs-unstable seems to be the norm when looking at other people's flakes, I feel it might indeed be a bit too unstable for me and "my" users. So, I am thinking about switching my flakes (which usually contain many system (nix-darwin or nixos) and home configurations across different platforms) to stable branches of said input flakes.
Unfortunately, it seems like I should complicate my flakes by having, say, nixpkgs-25.11-darwin for macOS, nixos-25.11 for nixos, and nixpkgs-25.11 for the Ubuntu machines as different inputs, and make flakes like home-manager or nixvim follow the correct nixpkgs depending on the platform, right?
Obviously I am hoping to see less surprises during the year when rebuilding the systems and applying home-manager configurations. Will moving to release branches really give me a significantly smoother experience with Nix and will this offset the downside of having to deal with said complication (i.e. different flake inputs for different platforms)? If so, can someone please recommend me an example of how to manage this additional complexity in an easy way?
| 08:28:28 |
 K900 | nixos-unstable is unstable in what way? | 09:03:56 |
| markus.lohmayer | Well, if I can reduce the friction with Nix, I would do it. That's also why I asked the question in this way (i.e. will moving to stable/release branches really reduce friction (while being on a given release)?). There certainly is friction. | 10:12:54 |
| K900 | What exactly do you mean by "friction"? | 10:20:08 |
| markus.lohmayer | In general terms, from time to time, after nix flake update, the config cannot be applied due to some error, or changes to the config are required (although these are often just deprecation warnings). | 10:28:28 |
| K900 | It depends on the kind of error, really | 10:29:02 |
| K900 | Also, keep in mind that stable is not LTS | 10:29:08 |
| K900 | You get 6 months of stable, and then you get all of those errors at the same time | 10:29:18 |
| markus.lohmayer | Ok thanks K900 , I take this as a recommendation to stay on unstable | 10:33:47 |
| K900 | Really the question is, what kinds of errors are you seeing | 10:34:10 |
| K900 | If it's packages breaking, that's less common on stable, yes | 10:34:19 |
| markus.lohmayer | If others can recommend to move to stable, I am of course interested in diverse opinions. | 10:34:29 |
| K900 | If it's module API or such breaking, that's delayed on stable, but generally unavoidable | 10:34:33 |
| K900 | And like, assuming you're pinning your inputs, which you should be, you can always rebuild without upgrading | 10:34:56 |
