* update contributing guides
- clarify a few phrases
- move Open Collective link to the top
- add section headings for easier navigation
- add a few details on contacting people
Co-authored-by: Silvan Mosberger <github@infinisil.com>
Wikipedia automatically redirects mobile users to the mobile version
when clicking a desktop link, but doesn't do the same the other way
around. This also introduces consistency, as some Wikipedia links use
the desktop version and some the mobile version.
* fix up language in the packaging tutorial
- make many sentences shorter
- add links
- expand on finding things
- use more domain-specific headings
- add next steps
Co-authored-by: Henrik <i97henka@gmail.com>
Co-authored-by: Olivia Crain <olivia@olivia.dev>
Co-authored-by: Silvan Mosberger <github@infinisil.com>
* 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>
the good stuff was historically hard to discover.
so hard that I found a new one just today...
- add Nixology
- remove the Nix Fundamentals, because it's better covered by Nixology
- add The Nix Hour
- add NixCon
- collapse Jon Ringer's videos into one link
- link to all of Wil Taylor's videos
- re-order the "other" articles to roughly match nix.dev contents
As it was written, I thought we'd have to do more work to supply fetchzip, but the next invokation of nix-build seems to call fetchzip without any definition errors so I assume the error is in the documentation.
* show nix-shell --run
it's quite useful and not necessarily obvious without reading reference documentation
Co-authored-by: Silvan Mosberger <github@infinisil.com>
historically it still points to Cachix and not to a community-owned
instance. at the moment there is no regular community newsletter, which
would certainly include updates about documentation. we can add it back
once such a thing exists.
I'm a newbie, so I might be missing something, but the use of an unquoted URL here seems like it goes against the "Best Practice" page (https://nix.dev/guides/best-practices#urls), which says to always quote URLs.
