Hello auxolotls!
We’ve been on the forums for around a week and a half.
Over that time, it’s become clear that our initial roadmap wasn’t perfect. It was unclear, leading to confusion. It contained ideas which were unfeasible, ideas based on incomplete information, and knee-jerk responses to the situation.
As we’ve talked, we’ve seen the board’s response to the open letter, the launch of Lix and discussed how we plan to execute on making an alternative ecosystem to nixpkgs. Over time, we’ve been straying from the initial roadmap in places – however @committee_steering doesn’t see this as a cause for concern, we don’t do everything perfect the first time and the roadmap is no exception!
Therefore, we’re making the following changes to better align with the current situation and community consensus:
We’re archiving our nixpkgs fork
This has been suggested a little in the past. After the discussion in @getchoo’s “future of the fork” post we’ve had lots of excellent feedback and it seems clear that we need to update our direction.
Community plans are not currently to maintain and continue nixpkgs in its current form If we’re going to move over and drop dependence on nixpkgs without providing new updates in auxolotl/nixpkgs in the meantime, there’s little point in us having auxolotl/nixpkgs. We don’t want to put time, effort, experience and security on the line in order for a GitHub org name in your config.
If you’re using the fork, we suggest you switch back to the upstream nixos/nixpkgs.
If you’re using channels, you can re-add the NixOS channel:
nix-channel --add https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/nixos-unstable nixpkgs
If you’re using flakes, you can change the organization name from auxolotl to NixOS:
- nixpkgs.url = "github:auxolotl/nixpkgs/nixos-unstable";
+ nixpkgs.url = "github:NixOS/nixpkgs/nixos-unstable";
(In the above commands & code you can substitute nixos-unstable for whichever upstream release of nixpkgs you prefer)
We’re hoping that doing this will provide a clearer view of what we plan to do, as well as free up resources to do other things that matter to us - like getting you a minimal system that doesn’t depend on nixpkgs as soon as possible.
We’re moving to Forgejo
As a side-effect of dropping the nixpkgs fork, we believe that using alternative forges, such as Forgejo, is more achievable. As the initial discussion stalled on an unwilling result of GitHub due to the enormity of nixpkgs, but there were plans to switch to another platform when it became possible, we’re moving to Forgejo.
When we switch to Forgejo, we’re still interested in providing contributors an easy on-ramp, perhaps by doing something similar to Lix, where login is available using GitHub or a separate account. We’d love to hear your thoughts on this!
We’re removing things that would interfere with Lix from our roadmap
We’re excited about Lix, and we think you should be too. We don’t fancy competing with them on forking CppNix, because we believe they’ll do everything we could and more. From your discussions we believe you feel the same!
This means that some roadmap items, such as the path to a better flakesV2, will be left up to Lix.
We’re still interested in other polish, such as the Aux CLI or enabling flakes by default in our system images. For the time-being, we’ve left them on the roadmap.
We understand the contention of having technical details on the roadmap, which we have been historically unwilling to make broad changes to, but we still believe it’s important to signal what phase they could happen in. We’d love your feedback on the roadmap, and after your discussions are a lot more willing to modify it. Please let us know if you still think we’re making a misstep here.
We’re rewording for clarity, and editing to match project needs
We’ve renamed some phases to better match their intention, for example “organization” was changed to “solidification” – it’s very little about organizing and much more about updating and solidifying governance and technical structures.
We also merged and reworded some phases to better reflect the need for, e.g. CI much earlier in the project. These are discussions that are already happening, and we don’t want the roadmap to discourage you.
How can we do better?
We would love to hear your comments on the changes. We understand that many of you may have liked the current roadmap and may be concerned about some of the changes: that’s understandable! The new roadmap isn’t set in stone, and we want to hear your feedback.
That said, we’re sure many of you are glad about what we’ve announced here: we’re making these changes to better fit community consensus. We’d love your feedback on how we could do even better. Is there anything we missed? Any way we could communicate the roadmap better to you?
Thank you for your contributions, discussions, and advice,
The Auxolotl steering committee.