unified product and story

[fricklerhandwerk]

• are Nix, Nixpkgs, and NixOS one thing or separate projects?
  • see discussion from team meeting NixOS/nix-book#1
    • related: https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-homepage/issues/734
  • what about Home Manager, nix-darwin, NixOps, Disnix, Hydra, etc.?
    • more generally: what do we consider part of the Nix ecosystem for the purpose of documentation?
  • should we educate users on the differences or tell a unified story?
    • considerations
      • scope of required changes
      • expertise requirements
      • coordination effort
• related: NixOS/nix.dev#285 NixOS/nixos-foundation#34
• [ ] add decision to roadmap

[fricklerhandwerk]

• @thufschmitt
  • they are organizationally separate projects with different lifecycles
  • Nix does not make sense without nixpkgs, cannot explain one without the other
  • @edolstra
    • can't really talk about Nix without examples from nixpkgs
    • "the book" should be an overview on the Nix ecosystem, not a new manual for nixpkgs or NixOS
    • in practice Nix and nixpkgs are inseparable, and only a tiny amount of people run Nix without nixpkgs
    • using Nix on NixOS is very different from without NixOS
      • "the book" should be generic
  • @domenkozar
    • we know from experience that people very often do not distinguish Nix, nixpkgs, and NixOS
      • from user perspective it's all the same swamp
    • Nix should be called "Nix core" to make the distinction clear
  • @infinisil
    • possibly distinction is between developers and NixOS users
      • people are confused a lot about these things, although the use cases are very different
        • they ask question such as:
          • do I need NixOS to run Nix?
          • website talks about Nix, but is called NixOS
        • we should do something about that confusion
          • e.g. NixOS to <Something>OS, or rename Nix language to something else
            • @domenkozar agree
            • @fricklerhandwerk renaming is very expensive socially and will break links and pathways into the ecosystem
              • instead define clear nomenclature and make the distinction on the front page of the web site
              • match domain name project names
  • @edolstra we should get a separate Nix domain
    • doesn't have to be nix.org
    • @thufschmitt is it supposed to be for the package manager or the entire ecosystem?
    • @fricklerhandwerk what if we migrated everything Nix+nixpkgs to nixpkgs.org and have nixos.org for NixOS exlclusively?
      • @edolstra disagree, Nix and nixpkgs may be intertwined now, but not necessarily in the future
        • @fricklerhandwerk what would it take to register nix.org?
          • mainly cover Nix package manager (and Nix ecosystem/community secondarily), as everything is built on top and around it
          • @edolstra: @grahamc contacted markmonitor.com (current owner) and it appears they would take tens of thousands USD for the transfer
            • @infinisil Nix foundation should buy it, even if it a high one-time cost
            • @thufschmitt we should consider the value of having the domain name for the project
        • would @domen assign nix.dev to the community?
          • @domenkozar before changing the name we should decide on the nomenclature
            • only having the domain name will not change the confusion on its own
            • @edolstra disagree, contents are arranged around the domain
            • names should be assigned to be unique and not be overloaded
              • we could decide on a different project name
                • @fricklerhandwerk no, this will lead to infinite bikeshedding
    • @infinisil this is leading nowhere, we should coordinate with the marketing team
      • @fricklerhandwerk will prepare options to discuss in meeting with marketing team

[infinisil]

Related to the domain name discussions: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nix-related-domains-that-i-control/10034

[nixos-discourse]

This issue has been mentioned on NixOS Discourse. There might be relevant details there:

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/2022-06-30-documentation-team-meeting-notes-3/20055/1

[davidak]

are Nix, nixpkgs, and NixOS one thing or separate projects?

Nix + nixpkgs and NixOS are separate products from a users perspective

you can use nix without nixos you can use nixos without interacting with nix ui

they have different use-cases, so they should have different stories

[infinisil]

@edolstra Did you get a reply regarding the cost for nix.org or nix.com?

[toraritte]

Nix + nixpkgs

One could argue that Nix "core" and Nixpkgs are separate as well: Nix "core" works with alternative package sets, and Nixpkgs also works with alternate implementations of the Nix core functionality (e.g., hnix).

[fricklerhandwerk]

@edolstra this is for the board to answer, could you please transfer it to NixOS/nixos-foundation?

[alper]

Here's the perspective of somebody who finally installed Nix(something…) on their M1 Macbook this week after hearing too much about it. Just take it as that but I'm pretty sensitive to developer experience.

I am perfectly able to learn another programming language but I'm not exactly thrilled by the prospect. Making the Nix language so prominent both in the tutorials section and leading here with it is I think a mistake.

I'm going to postpone learning it as long as I can and just get by copy pasting together bits and pieces I find here and there. That shouldn't be too hard and should probably be the main use case to cater for. End of the day, it's a configuration language that should fade into the background.

Also you can stop saying that it's functional because it's relatively irrelevant for the job that people are trying to do with it.

I hope I will never have anything to do with NixOS. So as far as I'm concerned it doesn't have to be rebranded, just remove the mentions of it from most places and that should solve the problem of confusion. I'm not looking for a Linux distribution to play with (those days are decades in the past) and I would be curious what percentage of new arrivals are.

At the moment I'm here to be able to have reproducible development environments ("a homebrew for every folder") and to be able to build docker containers.

[davidak]

@edolstra: @grahamc contacted markmonitor.com (current owner) and it appears they would take tens of thousands USD for the transfer

i bought a domain from some domaingrabber once that should cost like 17000€, but i said i'm a poor student and need it for a hobby project and i was annoying, i called every day. it was one young guy that had one woman to take calls, who said "he's still at work and can answer afterwards. i forward your request". end of the story is i got it for 150€! so their first price is probably not the final price, it could be 10% of that!

so if not already done, @grahamc could ask again and say, we are a non-profit community project that is created by volunteers and (funded by donations) and that we don't have that much money, but we are interested in the domain. make them an offer!

it is no surprise it's an expensive domain. it is short and a well-known term (*nix is often used for UNIX/Linux/whatever), so it is worth a lot. 10000$ might be cheap. we could try to offer 2000$, then 5000$, then 10000$. if they deny that, we can say that we can't pay more. if they still deny, wait a month and ask again... they will be excited by the opportunity to sell the domain and make profit! play their game

the domain could be worth 50000$ or more, but i don't think that's a reasonable investment for our project.

how much would the foundation invest in this domain? could we get some support from companies relying on Nix?

nix.org would be perfect addition to nixos.org. we need it (nix.dev looks messy)

[fricklerhandwerk]

@davidak I agree and will see what I can do following your proposal (without commitment or timeline), except:

we need it (nix.dev looks messy)

We have nix.dev with great thanks to @domenkozar, and it only looks messy because we haven't been focusing on presentation much – yet. This will change in the next months, we even have funding.

Regarding cost, keep in mind that the registrar may also charge nontrivial renewal fees.

[nixos-discourse]

This issue has been mentioned on NixOS Discourse. There might be relevant details there:

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/pre-rfc-a-single-canonical-domain-name/35102/15