[lolinder]

This is such a condescending attitude. What you mean is applications that are maintained the way that you and the Nix developers think an application should be maintained.

It's incredibly naive for a package manager as ambitious as Nix to assume semver. I'm a big fan of semver myself, but the vast majority of software projects follow it imperfectly or not at all, and for good reason—it's nearly impossible to follow it perfectly, because even bugs are part of your API. Every project I've worked on has eventually had something break on a version upgrade because we were depending on something that was later decided to be a bug (but at the time was just how it worked).

Elm can mostly get away with enforcing semver because they designed it that way at the language level, but Nix wants to manage dependencies written in all languages and ecosystems, which have dramatically different versioning practices.

[hamandcheese]

I think the thrust of the parent comment was more that the test coverage of this package isn't good, not that semver must be followed.

[lolinder]

Ah, fair enough, I misunderstood. I thought the tests they were recommending were tests to ensure backwards-compatibility between version bumps, I didn't realize they were talking about the downstream pacakge's tests.

I still disagree with the insinuation that it's everyone else who's screwing up and if we all did things the way Nix wants us to then Nix would actually work just fine. That's just another way of saying Nix doesn't work in the real world.

[hamandcheese]

Yep, I agree that the tone was bad.

It is unfortunate that some in the nix community come off that way, because I would say that in general Nix goes to great lengths to adapt to the world as it is. Especially compared to, say, Bazel.

I myself have been using nix in an org that is blissfully unaware of nix for about 2 years, if that's any indication of how adaptable it can be.

[pxc]

You're totally right. If you're a package maintainer and you find out some package is misbehaving even though all if its included tests pass, it might kinda make you feel like kicking the thing and calling it junk.

But we should recognize that some of what drives that is just defensiveness, and some is personal frustration. At the end of the day, Nix and Nixpkgs are for letting people run useful software more or less as it exists. It's not just for users or developers of perfectly tested, bug-free software. (Nix itself is certainly neither of those things, and neither is Nixpkgs!)

[SuperSandro2000]

Nixpkgs does not assume Denver that's why we run if possible the package's tests, our own tests and build dependent packages to make sure the most obvious breakages are noticed before things are even merged.

[lolinder]

Ah, I thought you were saying that if we all just used e2e tests to ensure we didn't make breaking changes in minor versions, we'd be fine. I didn't realize you were talking about the downstream package's tests.

I do still take issue with your insinuation that it's the package maintainers' poor practices that are at fault here. The real world is a messy, complex place and "best practices" don't translate well from situation to situation.

OP didn't ask for their package to be included in Nix. Presumably OP's system works for them and for their use case, but whoever created the Nix package made assumptions that turned out to be flawed. It's not fair of you to say that those bad assumptions are OP's fault because their package isn't "properly maintained" and doesn't "work as it should".

Someone (you?) made a bad assumption. Don't cast blame for that on someone who only knows Nix exists because it sends phony bug reports their way.