jeffhykin

Not always (which I'll mention in a moment) but:

• The trivial point was; car wait times are reduced when there are less cars.
• The main point is; even from a bike perspective its not about stopping/not-stopping, it's about wait time. I have NEVER had so many bikes in front of me that I missed the cross-walk signal and had to wait a whole other red-light cycle. Comparatively I regularly have that happen to me in a car. Idk if its a 30% improvement but its less time waiting at red lights.
• Finally, technically no, bikes don't always have to (legally) wait at red lights. This is only a technicallity but some crosswalks, like several in my town (or the iconic one in Japan), we get the walk signal on red. My town is also unusual by officially allowing bikes on pedestrian paths. So bikes can legally cross on red.

Wait like 3D volume? 😬 I was looking at it completely wrong

Oh cool! I didn't know about that. Maybe I can work eith the other person who is doing that.

If many people report a problem, the correct response is never "no, you're wrong, that's not a problem". There's no technical aspect to it, that is just common dececency when talking to another human.

That's the culture issue with Nix.

It doesn't mean an issue will never be "wont-fix" or that a issue won't genuinely be a skill-issue. It means it's not hard to say "I'm sorry, I disagree with adding support for that feature" or "here's a tutorial for [skill issue]" instead of saying "no, you're wrong, what you reported is not a problem". When you mention editing the CONTRIBUTING.md you're not offering help, you're just setting up a punchline for an "[but even that wouldn't help this IDIOT]". There's no sincerity, no sympathy or attempt to understand.

I don't know how to explain it any more clearly... you're not convincing anyone to help you on those "big issues" with words like "you really should have discovered the issues tab".

You actually bring up a very good point that I missed; another problem, maybe the largest problem with nix, is the culture issue.

A comment like "what do you mean nixOS doesn't have good documentation??? we have tons of good documentation!" feels very similar to reading what you just said about "You could simply open an issue on Github, I dont know how it could be clearer". Neither of those are a question. They're not asking "how can we do better? (I'm sorry you, as a new user, had a hard time)". Those comments are statements, and they say "you [person struggling to report a package-specific issue] are the problem; our system doesn't need to change. YOU need to change".

This culture issue has real consequences. It's the reason Determinate Systems has a separately maintained nixpkgs-installer script, and separately maintained documentation. Its the reason I also have my own independently maintained nixpkg-installer and nixpkg-uninstaller script. _

Maybe you haven't had our problem because you're really skilled and familiar with nix/github/whatever. Maybe you haven't run into our problem because your use-case doesn't overlap with ours. I am glad you don't run into the problem. But that doesn't somehow make the problem not-a-problem.

Adopt a legacy codebase that is massive and requires EXACTLY ruby 2.6.0-rc1. On ubuntu, using rbenv, it takes a newby 30 sec to list all the available versions, and 30 sec to install ruby 2.6.0-rc1.

Try finding that version on search.nixos.org.

Even excluding versions, try searching for the extremely-commonly-needed "Core Foundation" package on search.nixos.org. I assure you the package does exist on nixpkgs, I've been using it for years. As a newby had to spend WEEKS looking through the source code and learning nix-lang quirks just to find it.

_

But more importantly please ignore those details and look at the bigger picture; we are on the same team. I'm not insulting or ignoring the massive accomplishments nix team has made. They (maybe you as well) are giants that have moved moutains and accomplished things I wouldve considered basically impossible. I want to help the core devs have LESS work. I want to have productive discussions about the trade-offs of federated vs monorepo, searchability, documentation improvements, installer scripts, etc.

But we can't.

Not until the discussion starts with "I agree there's a problem" instead of "there is no problem other than YOUR lack of skill"

Agreed, flakes are the way. Its just making them searchable hasn't been easy/realistic until recently.

Also I feel like flakes are kind of tainted by always pulling in nixpkgs as a massive dependency chain. I think there should be a standard library separate from the packages, and nixpkgs.lib is 80% pure functions. So I've been working on making a "lib" flake that

1. Is 100% pure (no stdenv)
2. is versioned
3. doesnt link/depend on all of nixpkgs

I know it still won't be practical to avoid depending on nixpkgs, but I think its a step towards breaking up nixpkg into organized/managable chunks.

I worry some about devbox being closed source with their package indexing soltuion. I talked with them on a video call and they seem like great guys. And they said they'd pull the indexing part out of their private repo and make it open source so I could help work on it. They openly talked about their design and have blog posts about it too. But that was 2 maybe 3 months ago and I still haven't heard back. I should maybe ping them. The real downside is they've got an unusual amount of "lock in". Devbox is not a tool that enhances nix, its just a tool that uses nix under the hood. However they do solve the ease-of-use problem which is a really big deal (they make some tradeoffs though).

Flakes hub, by Determinate Systems, I have absolutely 0 concern about. They're truely just enhancing nix, and even if they dissapeared the packages already on flakeshub would still effectively work because they're distrubuted. Flakeshub is just a registry for standarized searching of flakes by individual people. Publishing is built on top of github actions which I'm not the biggest fan of. But there are ways of running github actions locally.

after spending +3 years getting experienced and reading a lot of the source code (getting past the documentation/learning-curve problem), I can say there are at least two fundamental flaws, with nixpkgs moreso than nixos:

(Edit: Added 0)

0. The culture issue. See thread below

1. The messy mono-repo was never desgined to be searchable. It might feel searchable to a newby, but many teams have dumped tons of effort and slapped together lots of hacks to make niche-package-versions even halfway searchable. Devbox is doing a good job of fixing this, but its not there yet.

2. The monorepo design is unmaintainable/unscalable from a package maintainer standpoint. There's a ton of contributor burnout, there's no automated quality control on packages, to outsiders its not obvious how to report package-specific issues or how to edit/fix/contribute to a single package, and instead of 30min to publish a hello-world npm or cargo package, users need to make a PR on the core, and get it approved. Meaning publishing a hello-world package would get rejected anyways. The good news is flakes hub is fixing this, and I'm really excited for that.

The good is;

• The pros still outweigh the cons. My projects from 3 years ago that I haven't touched still work (0 bitrot) first try, no manual install/setup needed.
• people have put a ton of effort into nix. Its truely amazing how many things work in nix despite how absurdly difficult it is to get things working with nix
• it is pretty much as reproducable as it can be and nothing else is even remotely close.

I want exclusively law-abiding citizens to be forced to live in glass houses!

Can we get the links/receipts/examples?

I'm onboard with the post, and glad to see Lemmy working as intended. Making a post (instead of silently defederating) is wonderful. That said, I think its very important to say "because of comments like X[link] and Y[link]" instead of "due to severity".

Imagine if the roles were reversed and the CCP was saying they're "defederating from lemmy.world due to severity". Members should be given the 1st hand evidence, rather than 2nd hand opinions/summaries.

Random tangent but its kinda crazy to think; when we're asleep we also don't do the selecting for what wakes us up. Like we can sleep through train horns and alarms, but can still wake up to our name being said. While everyone has selective sleep-hearing, we just also happen to be able to do the same thing when we're awake haha.