this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2024
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FreeAssembly

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this is FreeAssembly, a non-toxic design, programming, and art collective. post your share-alike (CC SA, GPL, BSD, or similar) projects here! collaboration is welcome, and mutual education is too.

in brief, this community is the awful.systems answer to Hacker News. read this article for a solid summary of why having a less toxic collaborative community is important from a technical standpoint in addition to a social one.

some posting guidelines apply in addition to the typical awful.systems stuff:

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They invited that guy back. I do have to admit, I admire his inability to read a room.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago (1 children)

the nixpkgs repo is pretty difficult to fork

For this reason, Tvix (a modular Nix implementation) cites compatibility with nixpkgs as one of their goals:

The package collection is an enormous effort with hundreds of thousands of commits, encoding expert knowledge about lots of different software and ways of building and managing it. It is a very valuable piece of software and we must be able to reuse it.

https://tvl.fyi/blog/rewriting-nix

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

Yup, there are a few efforts out there like that, I would group aux and lix in with them, as ecosystem-compatible parts.

My feeling these days is that the ecosystem is kinda screwy on a fundamental level, and I’m willing to blame the unhealthy focus on “purity” (both the word and the concept) for a good part of that. The language you use to define packages and systems doesn’t need to be lazily evaluated and purely functional; nothing needs to be, that is a lesson freely available to be learned coming out of the early 2000s.

Anyway, here I am slowly reading through the doctoral thesis, picking out the (several) grains of corn that make up the really good and solid ideas that make it a useful system; maybe a thing can be made that adds a bit of pragmatism… and then a lot of effort can be poured into that, unpragmatically.