Bit of a wash, tbh: I like that the “but simplicity!” computer touchers now write their trash code in a memory-safe language; it sure reduces the amount of extremely preventable issues by introducing some other extremely preventable issues.
I’m pretty sure this is just a handy convenience around launching another container that has debug tools in all the same namespaces (network, pid, user, filesystem, …) as the other. Kubernetes has a similar thing and it’s pretty handy.
Edit: oooooh wait, I misread your entire comment: you were referring to the ai-powered install instructions. Oops, and yep, that is a big yikes. Wow.
I recently learned there is a page showing just the comments of the communities you are subscribed to; that works for me because this space is so incredibly low-traffic, but I guess falls apart if you use that account to follow higher-traffic chatter.
Yup, there are a few efforts out there like that, I would group aux and lix in with them, as ecosystem-compatible parts.
My feeling these days is that the ecosystem is kinda screwy on a fundamental level, and I’m willing to blame the unhealthy focus on “purity” (both the word and the concept) for a good part of that. The language you use to define packages and systems doesn’t need to be lazily evaluated and purely functional; nothing needs to be, that is a lesson freely available to be learned coming out of the early 2000s.
Anyway, here I am slowly reading through the doctoral thesis, picking out the (several) grains of corn that make up the really good and solid ideas that make it a useful system; maybe a thing can be made that adds a bit of pragmatism… and then a lot of effort can be poured into that, unpragmatically.
Of course - it’s all part of the cancel culture grift economy. I look forward to us being able to hate-read Jon’s self-published autobiography in a few months.
Agreed that releasing stuff isn’t necessary, especially stuff propping up the ecosystem.
Unfortunately, I think the rest of your statements are exactly inverted: the nixpkgs repo is pretty difficult to fork (moves fast, needs expensive CI/caches to properly operate), and while we may still have the nix expression language (and hey, lix is a good implementation of it!), I’m getting more and more convinced that it is not such a blessing.
The phd thesis though, that one is pretty good (currently reading it for realsies); lots of good ideas in it, regardless one’s thoughts about the expression language (:
“average nix contributor is removed from project 3 times a year" factoid actualy just statistical error. average contributor stays on the project. Mod Actions Jon, who lives in cave & becomes a contributor 10,000 times each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted
Can’t wait to see the prompt injection attempts that reconstruct the entirety of paywalled papers tbqh.