[Nix-dev] Fwd: Why having releases if you break things in it often

Stefan Huchler stefan.huchler at mail.de
Sat Feb 11 06:13:25 CET 2017


Tomasz Czyż <tomasz.czyz at gmail.com> writes:

> But you know, experts stuff is pretty expensive resource, and maybe
> people decided will be better if they use it differently than you
> would expect?

So you find the time to create Regressions, but none to fix the Mess you
created?

Creating Regressions, is basicly the worst a developer can do, if he
would have done nothing it would be still better than creating a Regression.


>  I dont want to be a 100% full time nixos developer / sysadmin just to
>  solve such stupid problem. Except somebody would pay me for that, then I
>  would think about it.
>
> Ah, so you won't do it for free but you expect the army of experts to
> rush for help and do it for free for you, do I read that correctly?

"rush" the bug is open since over a month, I would not call that
"rush". 


> And now serious, nix is an effort of huge number of people, they
> contribute in their free time mostly, and even those who do it for
> cash, mostly work for some companies and nixos contribution is just
> side effect of their work.

If thats only a very unproffessional project, why creating a
professional looking web site?

So you find time for much PR, but you cant answer a bug report in a month?

> It looks like a lot of people think that
> nixos is so useful for their work they contribute to it and even help
> others. You can join to that movement and spend a lot of time learning
> about this open source project or you can use the company to help
> you. Few people started nixos consulting (me as well :-) and this is a
> second option, you pay for product/service. It's like most of the open
> source software, right?

Most other opensource software have good documentation, nixos primary
documentation is the sourcecode of the package-files or service files.

Also most opensource projects answer stuff on mailing lists, here I only
got told I should use irc or github bug tracker. Which is a pain in the
ass, cause I dont use irc and freenode has some restrictions and I had
in the past somebody allow my ip adress or somethnig because else it
would not work.

Also I hate browser interfaces and prefer mailinglists, but despite
that, I wrote a bug report there and got no answer in a month. Which btw
is also not standart for other opensource projects, only basicly dead 1
person projects dont answer for more than a week.

But instead of trying to discuss further if I am right or not, could
somebody just help me despite our maybe disagreing oppinion what I
should accept.

I wrote a derivation for another package I think nobody cared about
it. I dont care to much, because its not a central thing for me. So I am
not only complaining about bugs, but if I have time and its not
something from my productive "critical" systems, I dont care to invest
here and there some time.

But if something that worked fine just breaks from a stable update, I am
not willing to invest 20-50 hours to solve it, cause somebody else
did something wrong.

You can critisize my tone, but I suggest you stand over that and try to
step up your game a bit, and I am not talking about you personaly.

Again I dont even want a REAL solution, just a quick dirty hack to work
around that 2 3 nixos commands with the 50 options every command has,
that for you seem to be very simple and for me is rocket science with
very bad docu on it.

Of course you cant expept anything but death from live, but you dont
have to take me so literly. I just expect it, cause its what people get
in other mailinglists. Same basic help.

Real professionals take some angree words not that personal, if they are
not very disrespectful and under the belly.

The frustration is just not because I tried one thing, and it did not
work and I immidietly bitched about it.

Its just if you try several different things and nothing works:

1. mailing list no useful answer
2. bugreport no answer
3. doku horrible
4. tried some stuff that seemed to related
5. read manpages

and you nowhere see any lever to get it fixed, after 1 month or so, I
get impatiant.

I dont want somethnig fancy, I dont even have a feature-request, I just
want no regressions, or a fix for a regression, in a reasonable time.

I dont think thats that much to ask for.



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