You won't find FOSS.
There are alternatives to Google Pay on Android however. My bank (a "Sparkasse", German government-owned bank) has its own mobile payment app which appears to just simulate a Visa/Mastercard's NFC chip. IME it works pretty much on any terminal that accepts physical contactless cards.
Banks have much stricter privacy policies by law and I need to accept their terms anyways.
Money laundromats.
Öhm, warum reden wir hier eigentlich Deutsch?
I've felt the need a couple times but Google results were always worse.
If your headphones are crappy, a better source won't really help. It's not an or here, headphones make most of the difference. Only decent headphones will appreciably benefit from a good source.
MP3 isn't ideal but, unless you have rather good headphones, 320kbit/s MP3 is pretty damn near transparent.
Everything about a headphone design influences its sound, not just the driver. If your headphones are crappy, chances are that changing out the driver won't help much, even if that was feasible which it is likely not.
It’s the best solution, but my phone doesn’t have a headphone jack (fuck you, Apple).
You can buy a tiny DAC that plugs into the digital port of the phone.
The community could do with more people with merge rights or something like The Collective Code Construction Contract (C4).
That is nicely written but we have mostly already implemented that. There's some critical things like
A new Contributor who makes a correct patch SHALL be invited to become a Maintainer.
which we will not implement as commit access to Nixpkgs is security-critical. Anyone with commit access can push malware to thousands of users. We're doing good here not handing that out to anyone who contributes a patch.
Most of the nitpicks could be resolved by a linter and auto-formatter.
https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/pull/166
It's also quite annoying when a review is just a bunch of character modifications, renames, replacement of entire sections with no comment whatsoever. Or when knowledge is implied.
As a reviewer, you cannot know the reviewee's experience level. Simply ask and/or Google if you don't know something. We don't explain every little thing in detail that we comment on every 5 PRs. Nobody has time for that.
Why isn't
mkDerivation {}or./.OK
I don't know the context of the latter but the former is absolutely okay. It's just a matter of taste really and reviewers are free to express theirs.
Having it on nix.dev as a suggestion, is not the way to do it.
Why? That's official docs.
What's even worse is when you get one review like the above, change it, then get another review that again changes something according to undocumented convention, you change it, and another reviewer comes along with yet another such review. I don't contribute to
nixpkgsanymore, in part, for that reason.
That happens sometimes. I'm guilty of that too to a degree. If all you receive are such nitpicks, it's a good sign that the other aspects of your PR are good to go.
Also note that this isn't uniform among committers. Most don't care about nits very much unless you're doing something clearly out of the ordinary.
Two of the most notorious committers who did this have gotten their wrists slapped recently btw.
why not the rest? What about stdenv? What about fetchers? build-support?
I don't know how you imagine that to work? There is no generic way to document bespoke code (LLMs don't count).
How easy or hard is it to get a repo in the nix-community org?
I don't have much experience with that but the one time I did that I simply walked up to one of the nix-community admins at NixCon and asked them to. I imagine it works roughly the same without being in-person.
Who is allowed to make large changes to nixpkgs e.g review process, CI/CD, package naming, etc?
Anyone.
Small obvious improvements with little to no downsides or room for opinion can just be done and everyone will thank you.
For "larger" improvements with more room for controversy, you must go through the RFC process. See for instance https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/pull/140
How was the official wiki nixxed anyway? Was that an RFC?
I don't believe there ever was an official wiki? If so, that must have been ages ago.
The inofficial one is still up FWIW https://nixos.wiki/.
Edit: Looked it up and there was an official wiki at some point it was scrapped because it's better to have the documentation in the Nixpkgs tree together with the code. In a sense, it still exists in the form of the official manual.
When RFCs can simply be closed as "won't resolve" or whatever the euphemism is for "no, not on my watch" without community consensus, then I'm not sure what else to call it.
Not sure which one you're referring to.
There have also been packages requested by a few people, a PR from a newcomer attached and it just never crossing the finish line. A reviewer left a comment, the PR creator made a change and asked if it was fine now, only to hear crickets.
Most of the issues you see can be traced back to limited reviewer capacity.
If the OG nix community won't change (or won't do it quickly enough), then that's the beauty of opensource: the project can be forked.
Forking a project is a click of a button but that still won't solve anything. All problems mentioned here are problems of the community around the project which we sadly haven't found a way to clone yet. You'd have a project that is dead in the water because maintaining Nixpkgs is an insane amount of work that requires at least a community as large as the one around Nixpkgs.
tar-like movement of the OG nix community (or the maintainers? dunno)
Note that you're talking about an entirely different set of people here than the rest of the post.
A member finally had enough and just started another one (https://nixlang.wiki/), which IMO already looks and feels much better than unofficial yet officially linked to nixos.wiki
The main difference is that it runs different (IMHO better) wiki software; wikijs instead of a weird mediawiki fork.
It's great that they set it up separately but I'd fully expect it to become the regular nixos.wiki at some point with most of the content copied over. I don't think anyone wants to keep maintaining the old one's technical aspects now that this exists.
That wiki seems to have come from the official wiki being killed, but then a need for a wiki arising and a nix community member taking it upon themselves to create it
No, it's because nobody is really maintaining the technical aspect of the current unofficial wiki. The reason they went ahed and set up a new wiki is that it's easier to start from scratch on a new domain than migrating the old wiki in-place; both from a technical and organisational PoV.
as the (for lack of better term) nix top dogs for whatever reason didn't recreate it.
There is no such thing. I don't even know who set the wiki up. It's probably just some person who did it out of passion, just like https://nixlang.wiki/ now.
You seem to be assuming some sort of authority structure where there really is none. For better or for worse, there is no person or group of people who call the shots. That's not how we work.
Most of the NixOS infra for instance was held together mostly by one person in their free time because nobody else stepped up. They're in the process of transferring that role to a couple others who did eventually step up as we speak.
It's similar with a lot of things in the Nix community. The wiki is a good example. The person who set up the new one didn't want to bother figuring out who in the world maintains the old one and how they could get the new one in place, so they created an entirely new one instead.
there seems to be a resistance to change or at least an inability to take advantage of the good will and energy of the community.
There will always be resistance to change. Not all change is good afterall. In moderation, conservatism is a good thing (actual conservatism that is, not the BS kind in current politics).
I think what you're feeling is mostly correct but it's mostly due to lack of time and energy, not because we don't want to change.
The rate of change also isn't uniform. Compared to the infra or Nix itself, Nixpkgs changes quite a lot IMHO.
documentation isn’t sexy so not many want to do it
Don't think that's the primary issue. Most of us can appreciate good documentation.
It's more of a resource problem. We could either be writing docs or working on literally everything else. Docs are important but so are updates, fixes and new packages/modules/etc. Most of us contribute in our free time and would rather spend that little time on ensuring that the distribution works.
nix/nixos maintainers undervalue documentation efforts - I’ve tried to get in pull requests, but they just stall (not reviewed, nitpicked to death, simply not merged, etc.)
Not at all. It's, again, a resource distribution problem. That happens to many, many PRs, regardless of what they actually do. We have a rather severe shortage of reviewer time.
Nitpicks can be annoying but the people do it because they actually do care; quite a lot.
it isn’t generated from source code
It... is?
https://nixos.org/manual/nixos/stable/options (warning: humongous page, may crash your browser)
very top heavy decision making process harms the community.
What kind of decisions are we talking about? The RFC process is the exact opposite of "top heavy".
Some person with hundreds of commits can push through nearly any change (good or bad) relatively quickly, unless other frequent contributors are really really against it.
No. Someone recently got their commit access revoked for self-merging something that was really not good. We care about quality.
However, fresher contributor with a great change is forced to go through a never-ending process and few stay to actually finalize it.
Yup, that happens. We don't have enough time to give newcomers a really good experience.
Though if I'm honest, a fresh contributor should rather get more of a feel for the processes and conventions for a bit before trying to implement a "great change" (as in: size and complexity) anyways. That massively reduces the need to go back and forth over obvious mistakes a more experienced contributor would simply not have made.
maintainers can simply (and do) create a PR, make a change and merge it.
And it's frowned upon. Especially if that touches something someone else maintains and no reasonable response time was given.
Again, someone recently had their commit access removed for doing exactly that. We don't like this either and this issue is slowly but surely getting better now.
These difficulties just make me want to fork nixos.
That won't help anyone.
Damn rat files...
I just opened a nix-shell with unrar in it on aarch64-linux and am able to execute it, so yes, it can be made to work.
That isn't really an argument for EVs but rather an argument to build a train stop near them ASAP.
EVs are an interim "solution" at best in the vast majority of cases and the majority of resources should flow to the actual solution instead which is not the case in the slightest.