126
open letter to the NixOS foundation
(save-nix-together.org)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
Yeah, I enjoy hitting F3 twelve times to find the beginning of
mkDerivation
documentation - silly me, I must've known to search for "stdenv" documentation. Or having to find the source-code ofmakeWrapper
because the documentation for it is mostly in themake-wrapper.sh
. Or trying to find a lib function in the unsorted list of library functions.But why is reference documentation in the "manual" anyway and loaded as a single html? The configuration options are also one humongous html, but separated from the manual. So it is possible to separate the manual, but it hasn't been done for some reason.
Python uses sphinx or mkdocs, rust uses
cargo doc
, and C/C++ (+ other languages) use doxygen, and they generate multi page, static, documentation with quite reasonable search, but for some reason nix went the single document way requiring Ctrl+F.It is slowly getting better, but I find external sources to often be much better than the manuals.
Anti Commercial-AI license
Lol, I'm a contributor nix related projects (and formerly nixos) with rejected doc related PRs. I tried to help and it wasn't wanted 🤷
So sorry for having an opinion on the perfect state of nix/nixos documentation. I must not be seeing its perfection.
Anti Commercial-AI license