71 lines
2.9 KiB
Markdown
71 lines
2.9 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: "Announcing Snix"
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description: "Announcing the Snix Project"
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date: 2025-03-16T15:32:28+00:00
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lastmod: 2025-03-16T15:32:28+00:00
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draft: false
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weight: 50
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categories: []
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tags: []
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contributors: []
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pinned: false
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homepage: false
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---
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## A New Chapter
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For a long time now, Tvix development has been a bit of a tug-of-war between
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differing priorities. The TVL community's side project, or Tvix as an end in its
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own right. The evaluator front and center, or castore as the major innovation.
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The repository itself, the contributor onboarding flow, and even the choice of
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IRC channel have laboured under these conflicting views of Tvix's future.
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Snix is where we're hoping to put this to a rest, on infrastructure and
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community dedicated to driving an innovative implementation of Nix forward.
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## Background
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While initially being homed in the TVL community, for a while now already,
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most Tvix development has been going on in a separate `#tvix-dev` IRC
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channel, with little overlap with TVL.
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Onboarding new contributors was hard in general:
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- Newcomers had to clone the entire monorepo to contribute, bringing in a lot
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of unrelated projects, that are confusing at best.
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- Having all these projects made navigation hard, and changing some things in
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one place caused regressions far away in another corner of the repository.
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- Onboarding frequently required sending patches via email, as the SSO login
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process was somewhat neglected.
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There's been different requirements on CI for Tvix and TVL:
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- TVL overrides Nix to their 2.3 fork in their nixpkgs instance, which
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frequently causes rebuilds for contributors, caused CI deadlocks in the
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past, and most recently an entirely broken build for all contributors on
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MacOS.
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- Tvix has an extensive regression test suite, and nixpkgs bumps regularly
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caused them to fail, requiring investigation. However, as some peoples'
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system configurations are also in the monorepo, and they have an interest
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in getting nixpkgs updates quickly, causing Tvix tests to frequently get
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disabled, risking breakage of Tvix functionality.
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There have also been a few disagreements on which areas of Tvix development
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should be prioritized, and how certain things should be architected.
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# Snix
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Rather than continuing to navigate all these conflicting priorities, and
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spending lots of time coming up with a compromise both sides are not really
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happy about, I think it's better to put the project on its own legs, not only
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in terms of community, but also in terms of where it's hosted, using a new name,
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**Snix**.
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The fork will:
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- allow tailoring the surrounding build infrastructure to the needs of Snix
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- make contributions easier, allowing for a broader contributor base
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- unblock some long-deadlocked decisions on the future of Tvix development
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We're excited to work with new and existing contributors to Tvix and other Nix
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implementations to drive a modular approach to Nix infrastructure forwards.
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Find us at [Contact]({{< ref "/contact" >}})
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