NixOS
[RFC 0182] I'm Gonna Build My Own Home Tool With Blackjack and Modules!
This RFC proposes to enhance Nixpkgs monorepo with a declarative management system for basic users.
Co-authored by me and @nyabinary
This pull request has been mentioned on NixOS Discourse. There might be relevant details there:
https://discourse.nixos.org/t/brainstorm-for-rfc-assimilate-home-manager-into-nixpkgs-monorepo/48230/99
So it'd be easier to rewrite from scratch than to bring home manager into the nixpkgs tree?
You say you see this competing with home manager, but we know defaults are king, and I fail to see how home manager would get new users if similar functionality is implemented in nixpkgs/nixos itself.
In order to keep the conversation more discoverable, please refer to the lines of the file itself (the first one in case of general remarks).
This proposal basically boils down to “we should rewrite Home Manager in Nixpkgs, but better”. How it should be better is not elaborated upon; there are plenty of gripes you could have with Home Manager in terms of maintenance state, basic concepts (mkOutOfStoreSymlink has already come up), and the quality of some modules, but this RFC is completely non‐specific; it spends more time listing hypothetical command‐line arguments than saying anything about the Nix‐level structure of the system. As a result, I consider it completely non‐actionable. It’s unclear how accepting this RFC would help achieve consensus on the actual myriad individual design choices that would have to be made by any attempt at implementing it.
The advantage of Home Manager is that it actually exists. If its maintainers were interested in moving it into Nixpkgs, and the Nixpkgs community was amenable to that, then the path forward would be clear and there would be relatively few design decisions to be made. “Let’s just write our own thing” is not a viable proposal without significantly more detail about what our own thing should actually be.
I think that if you want a from‐scratch home management tool integrated into Nixpkgs, the best approach would be to prototype it out‐of‐tree and then open an RFC proposing its inclusion in the Nixpkgs repository; that way we could have a discussion about its design decisions and implementation trade‐offs. As it is, this RFC is a very bare‐bones sketch that punts on all the difficult problems and has no clear commitment to being implemented if accepted. I’m not sure it will be productive for the project to discuss it in its current state.
This pull request has been mentioned on NixOS Discourse. There might be relevant details there:
https://discourse.nixos.org/t/rfcsc-meeting-2024-09-30/53690/1
RFCSC:
This RFC needs shepherds move forwards. Whether the final decision is to accept or reject the RFC the shepherd team is critical for ensuring that all viewpoints are considered and that the RFC doc answers any questions.
Please consider nominating yourself or others as shepherds so that we can move this RFC towards conclusion.
This pull request has been mentioned on NixOS Discourse. There might be relevant details there:
https://discourse.nixos.org/t/rfcsc-meeting-2024-10-28/55095/1
Given that the original developer of Home Manager agrees with assimilating HM, I want to reformulate a truckload of things. Further I am cleaning up too much things on Nixpkgs right now.
So I will draft this.
https://github.com/feel-co/hjem https://github.com/snugnug/hjem-rum https://github.com/Gerg-L/linker
Interesting stuff here.
Interesting stuff here.
Yet anothr dotfile management project, recently announced on the Nix Discourse:
https://github.com/viperML/nix-maid https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nix-maid-systemd-native-dotfile-management/64619
I am inclined to close this proposal, since my interests in it have vanished.
EDIT: as I have said, I will close this for good.