The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded

The Nixpkgs Core team was established in Sept 2025 (https://discourse.nixos.org/t/establishing-the-nixpkgs-core-...), so it is a fairly new concept and idea. They've accomplished some good things as highlighted in the post, but are now stepping down. Yes, we'd prefer for the team to exist, but we've also functioned without one for ~20 years. It may take multiple iterations to bootstrap the concept and to figure out the right structure - or we may find it isn't needed. So no, this is not a critical emergency. It's a return to the status quo of late last year.

That being said, I think it is still a concept worth pursuing.

> more than anyone can imagine two people doing

The core team was just 2 people and they disbanded?

There was also a steerco for just 2 people?

I’m now even more confused.

I was lead on a Nix adoption effort for a few years that was kind of like that: it solved real problems, unlocked far faster, smaller, and cheaper builds than would have been possible any other way, and let us ship delta updates over crappy wifi connections to Linux computers on robots. Flakes were a perfect fit for our model, and we were just in time for stuff like up to date versions of cuda and tensorflow to be delivered via nixpkgs.

In my mind, Nix was unstoppable, and I particularly loved how empowered I imagined developers would feel. No mystery-meat CI scripts pushing packages to distant infrastructure that no one understands or even has the permissions to interact with, just the entire build system in one repo, trivially cloneable and hackable... add patches or build steps to anything and it's the same build as always, build it locally or send it to Hydra, it doesn't matter.

A devs "got" it and did leverage those things, used PRs to do safe evaluation of bumps to core dependencies, but I think on the whole it was regarded as cool but not tractable, and a few years after leaving, it sounds like plans are being laid to replace it all with something containers or whatever.

Very frustrating, particularly in a world where it should be trivial to identify the 5-10 typical tasks that people want to do with the nix code, and set up Claude skills to handle those. Given how easy and self-contained the build-test loop is, it feels like an almost perfect fit for agent-led development.

Can you share more about what made you move away?

I’ve been running a NixOS based homelab for awhile now with 5 physical hosts and about 30 NixOS containers/VMs in an Incus cluster and I can’t imagine moving away from my central Nix repo and ability to rebuild/upgrade the entire fleet in one command and feel confident that things will work.

While I’m concerned about the disbanding, it would take quite a lot to make me look elsewhere, and there’s enough critical mass that I feel confident others will step up.

> Meanwhile, my company is using Nix for everything heavily internally. Everyone gets their dependencies via Nix unless you are like using PAM or something.

Why doesn't your company fund development of nix and its associated ecosystem?

Is it really that complicated? I personally use direnv with nix to have per-project dependency versions installed automatically, and I’ve never had too much trouble. I know that the flake.nix files can become somewhat complicated, but mine have been pretty simple thus far.

This resonates with me as well. I was really into using Nix for awhile but it turned out to be more trouble than it was worth for a solo dev.

Agents are getting pretty good at Nix. I think it has sufficient critical mass that it'll be fine.

Is your company paying anyone to develop nix?

What is PAM in this context?

Welcome to zombocom

but the dependency hell for human is inherently political

Nix and NixOS probably wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the anime pfps :)

This was a governance structure that began ~1 year ago. Nix is 23 years old, so it won't be dying or going away due to this. But it is sad to see two extremely valuable contributors leave the project due to burn out.

Nix and NixOS are two of the most revolutionary pieces of software in my experience. Hopefully Nix finds a governance structure worth of it.

the thing being disbanded is less than a year old

In my mind Nix is too strong of an idea and once this community finally self-immolates, someone else is going to pick it up (maybe Determinate) and it'll continue on.

What alternative have you moved on to?

Isn’t this an apples/oranges comparison.

Nix/NixOS is fundamentally about a declarative system configuration.

And as far as I understand, StageX doesn’t have that.

Maintenance and updates will continue as usual. The maintainers formerly on the nixpkgs core team aren't even stopping their individual contributions.

LLM

If you've been part of an organization or a community that has undergone a big conflict or a schism, you'd understand. Plus this community largely communicates exclusively over text, which doesn't really work well for community repair. It's difficult to get people to feel OK with each other, or spend time together not arguing, when they only ever write intense letters to each other. Plus social work with technical people that spend most of their lives looking at a computer, not interacting with people face-to-face, does not exactly lend itself to socio-emotional maturity. Seems like in the case of Nix, the more mature people have repeatedly gotten burned out trying to tend to the mess and create a healthy community. It's extremely difficult to get someone to be humble, listen, reflect, and grow, when they are already upset and have their defenses up. And without our normal human tools or other trusted peers to help, like we can call on in real life, it can sometimes be near impossible.

Plus, in our highly individualized and hierarchical society, people don't have a lot of practice making decisions democratically, or coming to a consensus with people they disagree with. "Group projects" in grade school is pretty much the only time this happens during our socialization, which is incredibly sparse and inadequate. Anthropologically speaking, we should be doing this nearly every day.

They had to compete with the rust crew

Because people who do good work get attacked left and right and noone steps up.

The post has nothing to do with the election drama you cite:

> These issues have persisted despite our repeated attempts to discuss them. This is, of course, a systemic problem rather than one any single SC member could solve; we don’t envy the demands of the role, have been impressed by the efforts of several members, and recognize that every individual naturally has limited time and energy and can only do so much in the context of a representative majoritarian committee.