[dpatterbee]

As a response to (ii), I assure you that things are most certainly not moving very fast with experimental stuff like flakes. Flakes were first released as "experimental" almost 3 years ago and have been stuck in feature purgatory ever since.

[Macha]

To be blunt, this is driven by the rejection of flakes by a significant group of the contributor base, despite it being much more adopted by the user base at large.

Even as someone who does think Flakes are better than the prior solutions, I'm increasingly of the opinion that Flakes would be better moved to a layer outside the core Nix project - advancing them within core Nix at this stage seems pretty impossible with many within the project opposed to their existence. I think if Flakes were an alternative project at the same level as something like Niv, a lot of the holy warring would get out of the way.

1. Those who wish to improve them could do so without the discussion being deadlocked by "hey, we haven't yet agreed these should be stable"

2. Those who don't want to paint them as the path forward for fear of precluding a better option, now don't have to.

[grhmc]

> Even as someone who does think Flakes are better than the prior solutions, I'm increasingly of the opinion that Flakes would be better moved to a layer outside the core Nix project - advancing them within core Nix at this stage seems pretty impossible with many within the project opposed to their existence. I think if Flakes were an alternative project at the same level as something like Niv, a lot of the holy warring would get out of the way.

I posted some information and metrics about that on Discourse:

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/announcing-determinate-nix/547...

[bsimpson]

This sounds like the plight of TC39 Observables vs RxJS.