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New nixpkgs committers requests #50105

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infinisil opened this issue Nov 10, 2018 · 566 comments
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New nixpkgs committers requests #50105

infinisil opened this issue Nov 10, 2018 · 566 comments

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@infinisil
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infinisil commented Nov 10, 2018

See this issue instead: #321665


This issue is used to nominate people for commit rights to Nixpkgs. Use reactions like 👍 or ❤️ to indicate your support of others nominations!

Generally the expectation is to have a well-established PR history already. To see your current stats, you can use @lorenzleutgeb's script to see your merged and reviewed PRs.

Original text Nixpkgs has an ever growing number of PR's but not enough people to review and merge them. We need more nixpkgs committers! But we can't just select a random bunch of people and give them commit rights. It is a matter of trusting them to keep the codebase clean. People should go through a review process to be able to become a committer. This issue should serve as a place to discuss such a process.

https://github.com/orgs/NixOS/teams/nixpkgs-committers/members

@infinisil
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Having discussed this on IRC a bit, this is an arbitrary set of requirements I came up with:

To become a nixpkgs committer you need:

  • To have at least 50 merged PR's, 10 of which non-trivial
  • To have review at least 20 non-trivial PR's
  • To have added at least 2 new packages, to know how to write nix code and package stuff in nixpkgs
  • To have written at least 1 NixOS module

Of course, a manual check will be involved as well, but having such a set of requirements could set a baseline.

@infinisil infinisil changed the title New nixpkgs commiters requirements/process New nixpkgs committers requirements/process Nov 10, 2018
@infinisil
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In addition, a series of interview questions could be asked, such as:

  • "How does master and staging work, when to use what?"
  • "Describe the release process, what do you need to look out for during the release time?"
  • "There is a PR that updates libfoo, how could you test this PR?"
  • "There is a PR that adds 1000 NixOS options, what are potential problems with this?"
  • "A PR breaks backwards compatibility, what influences your decision on what to do?"

@infinisil
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  • "When would you commit to master directly, versus going through a PR?"

@7c6f434c
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7c6f434c commented Nov 10, 2018 via email

@7c6f434c
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7c6f434c commented Nov 10, 2018 via email

@andrew-d
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A question I don't have a good answer for: should we somehow split up "people who are keeping things up-to-date" vs. "people who we trust to refactor/make sweeping changes"? I'm very much in the set of people that use NixOS, but don't have any strong feelings on how nixpkgs is laid out, what the future direction is, etc., but am happy to submit bugfixes (e.g #47255), closure size reductions (e.g #49315) and security updates (e.g #49859, #49860). I have no immediate interest in doing any refactoring of nixpkgs, but would happily use any additional permissions to continue "just fixing things", like above.

@7c6f434c
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7c6f434c commented Nov 10, 2018 via email

@andrew-d
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andrew-d commented Nov 10, 2018 via email

@FRidh
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FRidh commented Nov 10, 2018

but if you could somehow ensure that the only thing we were doing was updating packages (or other non-controversial/scary changes)

https://github.com/kragniz/nixbot

@zarelit
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zarelit commented Nov 10, 2018

People with commit access are covering many roles that are more or less evident: they reduce the queue of unmerged PRs but at the same time they ask for or make changes (thus contributing to the overall quality) and most of all they are shaping nixpkgs layout and functionality by boosting or closing some PRs.
@infinisil it looks like those guidelines could be a rule of thumb to what can be called a nixpkgs core team, much like the Nix core team but applied to nixpkgs.
At this point we have some people with commit access and, knowing almost nothing of the project history, I can assume they earned it through trust and reputation so there is a process already but it's slow. So are these guidelines a way to measure contributions and speed up the process?

@7c6f434c
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7c6f434c commented Nov 10, 2018 via email

@Thra11
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Thra11 commented Nov 10, 2018

I don't know how easy it is to set up on github, but one way to allow less experienced people to help out with pull requests would be to create an intermediate tier of contributors who don't yet have full commit access, but have the ability to give a PR their approval. Once a PR has been approved by two or three of these 'semi-trusted contributors', it can be automatically committed by a bot.

@7c6f434c
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7c6f434c commented Nov 10, 2018 via email

@kalbasit
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@infinisil thank you for starting this process. I've been wondering for a while what are the requirements for me to gain push access and to be a part of the core team to help out with any refactoring or core decisions.

Over the past couple of months, I've submitted a bit over 50 PRs, some are version updates but many are not trivial (such as #47407, #49884 and #49815 among others).

I'd love to be the guinea pig of this process. @infinisil @domenkozar please let me know if I would qualify for the minimal requirements and I'd be happy to jump with you (and anyone else from the team) on a call or chat.

@aanderse
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Is the team taking names for consideration now? If there is still the desire to find help I wouldn't mind throwing my name into the pool of people interested.

@FRidh
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FRidh commented Nov 21, 2018

What I would like to know is what members intend to do, that is, what parts of Nixpkgs do they want to work on, and what do they want to be responsible for. The repository is large, and it's close to impossible for anyone to keep up to speed with everything that's happening inside it. While we can add more people to merge changes, and keep adding more packages, there are various bottlenecks that need to be addressed.

An important part is also, what are our expectations of Nixpkgs? Aside from the stable releases, many users use Nixpkgs as a rolling release. A rolling release requires far more effort to keep a working package set. I'm hijacking the thread here a bit, but simply saying "we need more people to review and merge" is a bit short-sighted. While I would like to have more people involved, I think it's more important that we come up with a strategy for Nixpkgs, and how we deal with Nixpkgs members is going to depend on and be a part of that strategy.

@domenkozar
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I think there are a few issues to tackle here, but they are not so much related.

Nixpkgs has an ever growing number of PR's but not enough people to review and merge them

That's a problem we have to solve. So far, to-be maintainers were nominated on IRC and we agreed upon which to give access. I think the process as such is not perfect, but fixing the stated problem is more about making the process of nomination more explicit, known and transparent. I wouldn't impose any kinds of limits how to gain access (I remember how terrible Gentoo process was with this quizz). I think it's better to leave the judgement to existing contributors rather than come up with some unified scheme of scoring that can be gamed.

But we can't just select a random bunch of people and give them commit rights. It is a matter of trusting them to keep the codebase clean. People should go through a review process to be able to become a committer. This issue should serve as a place to discuss such a process.

It's not random, we so far delegated the judgement to existing commmiters and that worked pretty well.

I think we need:

  • a form to submit that will nominate a potential committer
  • have a way to discuss the nomination (github teams are pretty cool here since we can limit discussion only to committers)
  • have more documentation about what is the responsibility of the commiter and a nice welcoming text

A completely different discussion is changing the structure of the current maintainer flat structure into something more organized.

@7c6f434c
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@domenkozar Re: gaming — well, there is also a value in something to help with the impostor syndrome and to suggest to people when it makes sense to self-nominate.

Better documentation of expectations from committers is also nice, of course.

@edolstra
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Nixpkgs has an ever growing number of PR's but not enough people to review and merge them

The solution to this is to modularize (split) Nixpkgs. For example, most NixOS modules should be maintained in separate repositories (== "flakes"). Then we don't need to have hundreds of direct committers to a huge mono-repository. Of course this will also scale much better in terms of Nixpkgs download time, evaluation speed/memory use, etc.

@oxij
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oxij commented Nov 21, 2018 via email

@veprbl
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veprbl commented Nov 21, 2018

I don't think NixOS has any shortage of people with commit bits. NixOS organisation has 65 members, plus, the nixpkgs repository has some additional committers that are not members. Looking at the list of members, I don't recall ~half of the names to ever merge a PR I looked at. Out of the remaining "half", a ~half would be mostly working on infrastructure and/or mostly merge their own PR or commit directly (I don't say they are not doing an important job, but in this issue we talk about reviewing PR's). My point is that putting work into reviewing those piles of PR's is not a small endeavour. In my opinion, the people who are willing to do that for free should be valued at a price of gold in the community. It will not be easy to find more people to help with that kind of work. I believe that just increasing number of people with commit privilege is unlikely to help the situation - it was not so effective before and I don't see any indication that it will help in the future. A more effective solution might have to do with improving the nixpkgs infrastructure to improve efficiency and convenience for people who are willing to work on reviewing. I don't know what exactly needs to be done. It could be improving some CI capabilities of @GrahamcOfBorg or adding functionality similar to Rust community's @bors or perhaps even gamifying the process a little bit (e.g. @rust-highfive).

@infinisil
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@veprbl The thing is, people might get commit access at some point because they have a lot of time and motivation to contribute, and that is a great help at that time. But times change, people change, they might get inactive or change their field. Those are the inactive people with commit access, most of them contributed well at some point.

We also discussed this a bit on IRC on how to fix this: People no longer active in the Nix community should be taken away commit rights after some amount of inactivity. Specifically, after 1 year of not participating in any nixpkgs issues/PRs this could happen, people seemed to agree on this.

@veprbl
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veprbl commented Nov 21, 2018

@infinisil The number of members doesn't bother me at all and I'm not calling for purges of any kind. That was not my point. I'm just skeptical about your proposed extensive solution to increase the number of maintainers to solve the problem of PR pileup. I think there are some unexplored intensive measures that we could take.

@infinisil
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infinisil commented Nov 21, 2018

@veprbl Well I'm certainly up for some purging though! I understand what you mean, but I disagree. Let's look at it like this:

  • We have a certain number of people with commit rights
  • Over time, some of these people become inactive
  • This means, over time we have less and less active committers
  • In order to prevent this, we need to add more new active committers than current committers become inactive
  • Who can become an active committer? Active nixpkgs people, what this issue is about
  • How can they become a committer? By knowing how to get commit rights, what this issue is also about

I think these 2 questions have long been standing in the way of many people trying to think of becoming an active committer. People don't know what "active" means and whether they are eligible. And people don't know how to ask for commit rights.

How did I get commit rights? After asking around a lot on IRC, I got the answer that I should ask @edolstra directly. So I asked him directly in IRC, and he was kind enough to give me these rights. Yes it worked, but it took me way too long to figure this out, and not everybody can figure this out, it's written down nowhere.

And yes, as seen in this issue, there are people who want commit rights, I don't think we'll have trouble finding them. On top of my mind, I know that both @worldofpeace and @kalbasit are relatively new community members both helping out a lot (thanks!) and wishing to get commit rights to be able to help out even more, and I'm sure there's more people to come in the future, this project is growing a lot after all!

I think this issue should stay a place to discuss how we can make the process of getting new committers easier and more standardized, not whether we should. We need to get new committers, there's no way around it, and this project wouldn't be this far if we didn't add new committers in the past. As a datapoint, @edolstra made me a committer 4 months ago and I merged 236 pull requests since then. I couldn't have helped out this much if I weren't a committer.

@7c6f434c
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Re: splitting the repository: I remember NixOS being in a separate repository. But then some changes needed to be applied to both repos in sync, which lead to eventual migration of NixOS into Nixpkgs repository. I would expect spinning out overlays out of Nixpkgs to cause similar problems.

@alyssais
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One of the things that has made Nix appealing to me (and easy to contribute to) so far for me has been that everything lives in one big repository. It means that there is one single directory I can grep through when I'm trying to figure out how something works, and one repository that I can bisect really easily when something has broken. Any time I've tried to figure out how something works on any other free operating system, I've become lost in a sea of repositories, where there's no way to reconcile which revisions match up, and to figure out what was used to build a system. For me, the monorepo has been one of NixOS's biggest strengths.

On the topic of new contributors, from my perspective as somebody who hopes to (at some point) become a Nixpkgs committer, and who has previously been one for another large package manager (Homebrew):

  • "To have review at least 20 non-trivial PR's" – as a non-committer to a free software project, it's often not clear to me whether reviews from non-committers are welcome. It can feel like there's not really any reason for my feedback to be needed, because it's not going to be up to me to decide whether to merge. Maybe I'm just going to be annoying people and getting in the way.

    I've been around Nixpkgs enough to know that, in this community, that's not the case, but in general, when coming to a new project I might like to some day be a part of, that's not clear to me. And if that's part of the path to becoming a committer, it should be stated that this type of feedback from non-committers is welcomed, so that people don't miss out on that by not realising it.

  • I would be wary of over-formalising. If you have an entirely numeric public set of benchmarks for when somebody can become (or be considered to become) a contributor, it would be very easy to end up with a situation where there's somebody that the team feels, for whatever reason, wouldn't be a good fit, but has met the benchmarks, and feels that they aren't getting something that they have earned and deserve. On the other hand, those same benchmarks might slow down the process of bringing somebody on board who would unquestionably be an asset. For example, somebody who had made 300 perfect package update PRs and reviewed 300 more from other people would likely be very valuable, even if they had no interest in larger changes or NixOS modules or whatever.

  • When people do get commit access, it would be nice for the community to know a little bit about them. I think it would help build the human connection between everybody working on this software, and would be a really nice welcome for the new person. Maybe a "welcome X to nixpkgs" post on Discourse with a little bit about what work they'd been doing and why the rest of the team decided to offer the commit access.

I think there's a middle ground between hard rules and giving commit access to random people. In my mind, I see a flow where maybe 1 reviewer notices a person who has been doing a lot of good work, writes up a private post to the other committers about whether it would be a good idea to bring them on board, and then invites them in if there were no real objections after a certain amount of time would be a perfectly healthy way to grow the community that wouldn't be vulnerable to getting caught up in bureaucracy.

@alyssais
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One more thing: if commit rights were something that had to be requested, I think that might put people off. "What if I'm rejected?", "What if it's rude to ask, and I should wait until I'm invited?". People can be shy or nervous, and it's important to remember that there is a power imbalance here between the "applicant" and the existing committers that could make asking straight up feel daunting.

I think it would be reasonable to assume that anybody with a sustained pattern of contributions would be at least interested in commit rights, and should be offered them when the team thinks it's appropriate. They can always decline. But that way, it's not up to one non-committer to work up the courage to ask.

@7c6f434c
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7c6f434c commented Nov 22, 2018 via email

@lf-

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@nrdxp
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nrdxp commented Jun 19, 2024

I support @jonringer's request to have his commit bit reinstated. Additionally, I believe that the decision to ban us on GitHub was misguided and stifled the natural RFC process without a valid (or even provided) reason. In acknowledgment of this error, I would like to request the reinstatement of my commit bit as well, along with that of anyone else who was temporarily banned in relation to this topic.

In general, it is important to recognize that a GitHub ban results in the removal of commit privileges, and such actions should not be taken hastily or lightly in the future. Anyone who has had their commit bit removed in this manner without just cause should be entitled to have it restored without the need for explicit reasoning, imho.

@NixOS NixOS locked as too heated and limited conversation to collaborators Jun 19, 2024
@pennae pennae closed this as not planned Won't fix, can't repro, duplicate, stale Jun 19, 2024
@samueldr samueldr reopened this Jun 19, 2024
@NixOS NixOS unlocked this conversation Jun 19, 2024
@samueldr

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@domenkozar
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domenkozar commented Jun 20, 2024

Invited @RossComputerGuy, @JohnRTitor and @jonringer.

Please, respect this issue is for requesting commit access and avoid all other discussions.

@GramExp
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GramExp commented Jun 20, 2024

Hi, I'm a PhD student in France, where I specialize in numerical analysis. I've been using Nix for a few years now, and it's become a crucial part of my daily work and research.

I rely heavily on Nix for managing complex software environments and ensuring my research is reproducible. Over time, I've developed a deep understanding of the Nix ecosystem and have become quite proficient with Nix expressions and the Nixpkgs repository, maintaining quite a few patches out-of-tree.

I’m reaching out to request committer rights on Nixpkgs. I’ve recently created a GitHub account (since I avoid using GitHub generally) to start contributing to Nixpkgs. Being able to commit would help me contribute more directly and efficiently. My goals include maintaining high standards for contributions, improving documentation, and helping to review and merge pull requests more quickly.

I'm committed to following the community guidelines and working collaboratively with the team. I’m excited about the possibility of contributing more to this awesome project without delving into politics.

@eclairevoyant
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@GramExp FYI commit access is unnecessary to contribute; many of our most valuable contribs have come from non-committers. Ideally the community would see your willingness to collaborate (particularly reviewing others' PRs) and adherence to nixpkgs guidelines before discussing commit access.

@JulienMalka
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JulienMalka commented Jun 20, 2024

@domenkozar is there a rationale why you decided to reinvite Jon despite the community feedback ? Given the criticality of the commit bit rights on a repo as big and important as nixpkgs, I think we need to build ourselves a better on-boarding process than the current one that seems to be "everybody ends up being invited without consideration for the voice of the community".
Be it only for matters of software supply chain security, giving commit access to someone that do not have the trust of the community seems very bad to me.

@domenkozar
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@domenkozar is there a rationale why you decided to reinvite Jon despite the community feedback ? Given the criticality of the commit bit rights on a repo as big and important as nixpkgs, I think we need to build ourselves a better on-boarding process than the current one that seems to be "everybody ends up being invited without consideration for the voice of the community". Be it only for matters of software supply chain security, giving commit access to someone that do not have the trust of the community seems very bad to me.

Jon has done a ton of good work for Nix project in the past.

I didn't see any evidence from the moderation team that his commit was problematic, but rather other behavior.

I've talked to Jon and we're on a good way forward, let's have some positive thinking for a minute in our community and let the wounds heal.

@NotAFile

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@jonringer
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This thread is meant to be an immutable log of commit requests, please move discussions about my commit bit to the corresponding discourse thread: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/should-jonringer-get-his-commit-bit-back/47267

@NixOS NixOS deleted a comment from nixos-discourse Jun 20, 2024
@NixOS NixOS deleted a comment from nixos-discourse Jun 20, 2024
@hraban
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hraban commented Jun 21, 2024

Hi all I'm on the common lisp maintainers list and I am the primary maintainer of SBCL (and I guess de facto also ECL and Clisp). I also sometimes dabble in hacking on stdenv / darwin.

That's all I got folks. :)

P.S.: The suggested script's "PRs reviewed" metric lacks -author:yourself, meaning it will include the PRs you authored in your reviewed PRs count. I'm assuming that's not the intent of that metric?

samueldr added a commit to samueldr/nixpkgs that referenced this issue Jun 21, 2024
I waited a long time, to wait and see how things would pan out.

It turns out obvious problems can't be dealt with, in an appropriate
timing and manner.

Thanks to one individual, backed by a possee of previously banned
individuals, and additional perma-banned individuals did it.

Thanks to all of you, I am quitting NixOS.

The continuous concern trolling, the continuous bigotted discussions,
the continued hostile tone, the actions made despite the numerous times
you were told to do better. The constant FUD. The constant waste of
time. It's not a single event. It is a pattern.

I do not think that this situation can be salvaged anymore.

Systemic issue in the lack of governance enabled this. While some will
put the fault entirely on the shoulders of the organization, I will say
that they share the blame, but the bullying and pressure from the
individuals ***who fully understand what they are doing*** is what did
it.

Couple that with the structural inability for action by the moderation
team being abused by those bad actors, and you have a recipe for
alienating and burning-out the leftover important contributors.

Let it be written here that I have discussed with organization members
and moderation team members about the continued behaviour of casting FUD
on the community by this individual. This was done this individual's ban.
It happened in what was (and still) tacitly agreed toe be a NixOS
community place, the subreddit. Probably elsewhere too.

Nothing was done, no mention of re-considering the duration of the ban,
and as far as I know, not even some discussion about how continuing the
behaviour that was the reason for being banned is unwelcome.

His name is jonringer (Jonathan Ringer).

What made me snap?

Not long after the ban being lifted, this individual continued with
weird persecution plots and conspiracy theories casting doubts on the
legitimacy of the moderation team's actions.
 - NixOS/rfcs#175
And in the least self-aware way possible, continued this discourse of
persecution and conspiracies, again casting FUD and divisiveness when
asking for what, with a reasonable person, would have a formality.
See the original comment contents.
 - NixOS#50105 (comment)
This continued into the same behaviour that brought up the initial
warnings and ban, on the unmoderated community-adjacent subreddit.
 - https://old.reddit.com/r/NixOS/comments/1djuxpx/drama_will_jonringers_commit_bit_be_restored/ https://archive.is/sCJJw
This continued onto the discourse into the same behaviour that
brought up the initial warnings and ban.
 - https://discourse.nixos.org/t/should-jonringer-get-his-commit-bit-back/47267/46

The absolute insolence, consistently twisting the words I wrote to fit
in his imagined narrative, took me over the edge. Then the moderator
decision to *increase the time-out delay* to twelve hours, which at
one hour was already causing the bad behaviour of mass-dumping
information into single messages, meant there was no way for me to
correct the facts and act in this manner without relitigating
elsewhere gave me the time and energy to do it.

That's it.

The behaviour of this person. No political beliefs (I still don't know
what they are). No employer (while I know and hate it, it is what it is).
No plot form some shadow bagel trying to somehow do... Only jon knows
what it would do... No take-over plot... Only the unacceptable
behaviour, or character if you will, of that person.

Someone who from the start always had an equal opportunity to participate,
regardless of his attributes. This person should have been accountable for
his actions, but couldn't understand it.

This was not helped by their posse harrassing me personally, on top of
all that.

In other words, the organization and community is not tooled to protect
its valued members.

***So I am quitting with prejudice.***

Even though I helped build the NixOS project for over seven years,
helped the community be the best it could in the IRC times, helped
direct some of the community decisions.

I did not want to leave this community, because this is not only my
home, but I built it with collaborators who cared. It seems like
there is no one who cares left anymore. And I was pushed out against
my best efforts.

Mostly thankless to the end.

— samueldr

Signed-off-by: Samuel Dionne-Riel <samuel@dionne-riel.com>
@nixos-discourse

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@domenkozar
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Given that the moderation team doesn't want to take action against personal attacks against me, I'm not longer willing to participate in this madness.

It seems like some people can attack whatever they want, "stating facts", others are guilty of defending themselves.

I'm no longer going to help out here.

@piegamesde
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piegamesde commented Jun 21, 2024

Can we please keep this one closed now, this time? It was always a deeply flawed process in the first place, and now it has completely and decisively fallen apart. I think that a new process should be established by the new governance, and that we are better off holding off new committer requests for a couple of months until they are done, than continuing this shit show.

@hraban
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hraban commented Jun 21, 2024

I think this gives me the questionable honor of being the last to have requested commit rights. 😁

"A request so detestable, it was immediately followed by an abolition of the very application process itself and a months-long moratorium on the admission of any new members!"

I should put that on my resume. 😬

(just kidding folks)

@NixOS NixOS locked as resolved and limited conversation to collaborators Jun 21, 2024
@Mic92
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Mic92 commented Jun 22, 2024

It's a bit sad to see that our old on-boarding process is now stopped without having a suitable replacement. As I also run the scripts every year that remove inactive committers, I know that we have a churn of old committers leaving for all kinds of reasons i.e. life getting in the way. Therefore I would like to keep the momentum and keep collecting nominations until a process is in place: #321665

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Mic92 commented Jun 22, 2024

I also created this new zulip thread so we can start discussing what the new process should look like: https://nixpkgs.zulipchat.com/#narrow/stream/435724-governance/topic/New.20nixpkgs.20onboarding.20process

@SuperSandro2000
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So long, and thanks for all the fish.

Thanks you for your work Domen!

@infinisil
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For wider visibility I'll mention it here: We now have a new team empowered to change the Nixpkgs committer list, documented here!

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