I’ve been on a team where two co-chair leads bickered and eventually split. I was a member in both of the new teams (two projects) and both turned out great for different reasons.

I plan to do the same with Nix and Aux even if everyone else picks sides. And I’m glad the link was posted here.

Agreed, it must take after its parent haha

Just commenting here to ping you that I found a new major alternative! I’ve edited the comment but TLDR; search “.NET Avalonia” and see what you think

Absolutely, I didn’t mean my comment as excuse or justification. I personally don’t want any sponsored people on the board. Defense contractor or otherwise.

I’m still trying to disentangle the “stirring up drama” part though.

I don’t know what AstroTurf means. Jon might be in the wrong, and I’ll edit my comment to put bad stuff at the top once I’m caught up. I’m just giving the info I have. If you have some let me know.

If AstroTurf means a bot, check my history here and on Github (jeff-hykin)

Edit: turns out this story goes way beyond Jon, all of Nix is in flux right now. My personal experience is kind of irrelevant.

Edit edit: just read this: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nixos-foundation-board-giving-power-to-the-community/44552

Original Post:

As a first-hand account; Jon has been the nicest of all the maintainers I’ve had interactions with ( ~7), probably followed by Ryan Mulligan. The only reason I remember Jon’s name (I usually just recognize maintainers by their profile pictures) is because a couple years ago, as part of this thread I was reading this github issue with a really rude/attacking user. I remember reading Jon’s response and thinking “This is one of the most patient FOSS devs on all of Github”.

However, take ^that as-is, because I am not up to date on anything recent. I just wanted to provide the small bit of insight I do have.

Here’s some of my interactions for those who like to judge for themselves:

• https://discourse.nixos.org/t/update-nix-to-unstable/9550/5?u=jeff-hykin
• https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nixpkgss-current-development-workflow-is-not-sustainable/18741/20
• https://discourse.nixos.org/t/clarification-on-package-names-and-versions/9819/4?u=jeff-hykin

Same haha.

I’ve already started it twice for lemmy, but didn’t put in heavy effort yet. I’ve got a wrapper for nix that helps with common issues, but its on the messy side.

There are so many small GUI apps I want to make but I refuse until I can get Tauri to build an appimage and macos app within nix. It was more than a year ago since I put a lot of effort on that though. If you’ve got any tips/pointers or examples for tauri I’d be happy to hear them.

Sadly it still causes system instability even if you NEVER need the feature.

You might not need numpy at all, but Pandas needs numpy and Opencv needs numpy. Sometimes pandas needs one version and Opencv needs a different version. Well… python only allows one global verison of numpy, so pandas and opencv fight over which one they want installed, and the looser is forced to use a numpy they were not designed/tested for. Upgrading pandas might also upgrade numpy and break opencv. That causes system instability.

Stable systems like cargo coupld upgrade pandas, have pandas use numpy 1.29 without touching/breaking opencv (opencv would still importing/using using numpy 1.19 or whatever). That stability is only possible if the system is capable of having two versions of the same dependency at the same time.

And FYI to OP, if you can’t install two versions of the same library at the same time (ex: numpy 1.25 and numpy 1.19) then the answer to “has its dependencies under control?” is generally “no”.

• Deno (successor to NodeJS) is “yes” by default, and has very very few exceptions
• Rust can by default, and has few but notable/relevant exceptions
• Python (without venv) cannot (even with venv, each project can be different, but 1 project still can’t reliably have two versions of numpy)
• NodeJS can, but it was kind of an afterthought, and it has tons modules that are notable exceptions

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The more reliable/reproducible the container is the more pain/effort it is to setup. If you don’t need reliability, then you don’t need containers.

• If you want unbeatable reliability, use nix.
• If you want better-than-nothing use venv/anaconda envs (one or the other, not both)
• If you want the most reliability-per-effort and don’t care about performance, use distrobox

Also

I’ve exhausted every EXE-generating option I could find [for python]

Unfortunately software is one giant mess right now. You’d think things like compiling to an EXE for python would be standard. They’re not. One day, maybe 15 years from now, we will have Nix be user friendly, a single line installer for everything, and have it all “just work”. But until then, almost everything is hacked together.

Overview of (basically) all GUI systems

I believe Flutter, React Native, and Android studio are the only major ones I don’t have experience with.

EDIT! (2024-4-30) .NET Avalonia seems like a great modern option that I have not gotten to try. Its C# and fully cross platform. It could be a real game changer compared to the options I’ve listed below

• Yes as far as I know theres no good exe maker for python. Python without dependencies (or async) is great, a nice little scripting lang for prototyping or data analysis. Python with dependencies is terrible, truly awful for packaged user-applications.
• C++ / C are and effectively will always be miserable IMO. You’ll basically never be able to automate it without nix. Make, cmake, autoconf, pkg-tools, ant, etc they’re all a mess. For example, biggest blocker to python packaging is that many python packages are wrappers around C/C++ packages. The most annoying thing about one of the tools I’m about to mention (electron) are the dependencies that secretely use C++.
• The most modern, consistent, and cross platform graphical systems right now are Electron and Tauri, which are literally browsers with URL bar/buttons removed. Electron is what Discord, Spotify, and VS Code use. Its bulky but theres a lot of support/tutorials. Tauri is the new, faster/cleaner kid on the block and uses the Rust language, which has good dependency management. But Tauri doesn’t have the tutorials or ecosystem yet. Also Rust is a very hard language. For both you’ll need to learn Javascript/HTML/CSS, which is probably good. But you’ll also need the terrible npm ecosystem, and get introduced to javascript frameworks which seem great until theyre not. That said, basically every cross platform not-browser GUI I know of (JavaFX, QT, TCL/TK, WxWidgets, FLTK) has exactly the miserable experience you’re getting; lots of dependency hedaches, and weird graphical differences between operating systems. Also that list is in order, with FLTK being untouchable garbage, and JavaFX being the least-bad in my experience.
• Even if you’re okay with using a broswer, (which solves lots of dependency/setup problems, and is the most useful/flexible UI system I’ve used) it still has stupid API problems because HTML was originally made to display documents (like microsoft word documents). It wasn’t meant to be a full blown UI system; it just became that over time. Stuff like styles and positioning in HTML has edgecases, like “fixed” meaning absolute and “absolute” actually meanting “relative to parent” and “relative” meaning “relative to where the element would normally be”.
• Unity game dev (uses C#, which is similar to Java, but better IMO) might actually be worth looking into for your case. First check the unity API’s for your images and GPS tasks. The good news is they support packaging up applications for every OS. The bad news is you can’t automate the setup because its proprietary. The (very good) open source alternative is Godot.
• The final alternative is, just don’t go cross platform. This is the only not-mess, not hacky, intentionally-designed toolset approach I know of. MacOS has Swift and XCode, Microsoft has Visual Studio and C#. Neither are great but they’re both the “this is how we expect you to do it” approches. You might be able to adapt these to other platforms (swift has been gaining some cross platform support and the .net runtime for C# can be cross platform).

My perfect setup would be Tauri (with all security disabled), with Deno accessible on the front end, all installed/setup by Nix. But alas, that doesnt exist yet. Even with +3 years of nix experience I can’t even get Tauri running in Nix.

I disagree slightly, but only with his level of cynicism. I agree, we see the “peak diskwasher” problem everywhere. And I agree with his conclusion. But I feel he glossed over that, well, people still need dishwashers. Growth might be impossible, but a steady and “boring” amount of profit should still be possible selling plain-ole-dishwashers. Yet … for some reason, we don’t see that.

Instead companies throw everything into growth and we get the retarded bluetooth enabled dishwasher problem everywhere, and I’d like to know more about why.

I’ve used racket before and I did not know about this! If you’re willing to share I’d love to hear more about how you defined that assembly lang.

Linting let’s you use indentation based block delineation instead of curly brackets while keeping the rest of the language functionality?

😂

“Yeah we could make single defacto config, one that requires no additional dependencies, and one that entirely skips the mess of cli-args-via-env-vars … OR 😏 We could make users pick one of several competing options, all of which do effectively the same thing but are mostly incompatible with each other and allow for a new tabs-vs-spaces-kind-of debate while also not letting you understand other peoples code bases unless you learn all of them. And, not only does it require everyone to install a separate binary, but also they need to somewhat coordinate on which version–versions that are independent from the gcc version but must be kinda-sorta-coordinated with the gcc version.”

Sorry, I’m not convinced

I expected this comment section to be a mess, but actually it’s really good:

• “why not what”
• “as self-documenting as possible”

If you want an example, look at the Atom codebase. It is incredibly well done.

also if you’re interested in languages join c/programming_languages!

LLVM is the engine everything compiles to. The problem is there’s no car, it’s just the engine lol.

And other than Rust (which uses LLVM) the existing cars are not very configurab–well I mean they’re configurable but not at the extreme level of configuration you’re talking about.