Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

@TrinityXaos@mastodon.social ... huh? Where's the "public transport" option?

I beg of you, don't publish packages with a million different builds of the same code, just stick with one build per environment that actually needs it

okay now they're just taunting me

@adryd@sleeping.town Yes!

@riley@toot.site I think there's a couple of projects like that, like `niv`, but they always seem to be incomplete in some way

@riley@toot.site Heh! I bet your idea didn't involve compiling it to JS to then running it in V8 and take advantage of its ridiculous optimizations, though :p

@riley@toot.site Oh yeah, so do I... I've actually been working on an alternative implementation of Nix (on-and-off) that *should* be both faster and more hackable - with a bit of luck that'll allow for experimenting with better UX!

@riley@toot.site Oh no :(

@riley@toot.site Like, there was a bunch of frustrated discussion a while ago about flakes being widely used already despite still being technically experimental (and therefore having breaking changes), I'm just hoping here that the problem isn't even worse

@riley@toot.site Wait, that's only the case when flakes are enabled, right? Or always?

@riley@toot.site Wait, which change was that?

@riley@toot.site The flakes stuff?

@kaasiand So close :D

@skaryzgik My main takeaways from this would probably boil down to:

1. Make cultural and social expectations *explicit*; be clear about what your values and goals are as a community, instead of expecting word-of-mouth to do the job. And I don't just mean "don't be a bigot", but also eg. the anti-capitalist values that are necessary to maintain a healthy public commons.

This also includes 'community consensus' values - for example, deliberately leaving space for living standards designed by the community, and carefully ensuring that any central steering organization doesn't interfere with those, and preferably *adopts* them.

2. Do not ever accept for-profit organizations as "full" members of the community. By definition, they will always place their own interests above those of the community, and they should be treated accordingly - as threats to defend against, not as contributors.

They might *use* the tech, but it should be clear that they're not really wanted in the community, and their needs and interests should be actively deprioritized compared to those of individuals and grassroots non-commercial organizations.

Any funding from them should be very carefully considered - money rarely comes without strings, even if they're not always written down, so this is something to be extremely cautious with.

3. *Particularly* dangerous - this is what killed npm - is the sentiment of "oh yeah, I know they're a business, but they just need to put food on the table, they're good people, it's not like it's Google".

Sounds reasonable on the face of it, but corporations exist independently from their founders, and will almost never follow their founders' ethics. In practice, npm was a VC-funded corporation that acted in the interests of its shareholders, and this meant that VCs controlled the fate of the public commons.

The same is true even for small for-profit companies. *Never* let the fate of your community rest on what is legally a for-profit company, no matter how nice and friendly the owners seem. If you must formally incorporate, at least make it a non-profit that is controlled solely by individuals, not by for-profit actors.

Granting control over any critical part of your ecosystem to a for-profit organization is not only unnecessary, it's also playing with fire.

4. Take concerns about the health of the ecosystem seriously, and make it an integral part of your culture to evaluate such concerns seriously whenever they are expressed. Don't default to "I'm sure it'll be fine" or "but can you *prove* that there is a problem".

Very often, a small handful of people will spot problems early, before they become obvious. Take those people seriously. They may not necessarily be *right*, but they're not crying wolf for no reason.