* front page: Who is Nix for?
For at least two years there were ongoing debates about the target
audience of the Nix ecosystem. Nix maintainers did not manage to
converge on a statement [0]. The marketing team is explicitly focusing
on software developers [1], and the documentation team was supposed to
align with that from the very beginning [2].
What was missing so far was what we mean by "software developers".
Arguably, it encompasses a particular mind set about how to deal with
computers and enough time to learn things.
And while for documentation it matters most *what* the software is doing
rather than *who* it is made for (or by), the ecosystem is a community
effort, and people matter [3]. So far, we haven't really identified the
(eventual) boundaries of this community (at least I don't know of any
serious attempt), which also plays into the definition of a target
audience. Yet, in practice, not every contribution, not every question
or comment is treated equally, and this has reasons in our implicit
assumptions about who belongs.
This is an attempt to draw such a boundary that is not arbitrary, and
neither to narrow nor too wide. The goal is, as always, to help
Nix beginners set realistic expectations for their journey.
The list of occupations/interests who may benefit from Nix is based on
the 2022 [4] and 2023 [5] community surveys.
[0]: https://github.com/NixOS/nix/pull/7156
[1]: 76d42a052d/community/teams/marketing.tt (L89)
[2]: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/2022-06-15-documentation-team-meeting-notes-1/20004
[3]: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/zurich-23-05-zhf-hackathon-and-workshop-report/29093#ux-workshop-21
[4]: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/2022-nix-survey-results/18983
[5]: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nix-community-survey-2023-results/33124
Co-authored-by: Daniel Sidhion <DanielSidhion@users.noreply.github.com>
in particular, give more concrete tips on filing issues.
this is based on experience with helping to maintain Nix and trying to make
sense of what's going on in Nixpkgs.
