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NixOS
rfcs
Markdown2018–2026
NixOS / rfcs

rfcs

The Nix community RFCs

Systems & Infrastructure
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
39Distinct people
64Mentions
2Explicit recommenders
659GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

The Nix community RFCs

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

Nix packages are blindly and automatically signed by a single private key last I reviewed it. Bribe or compromise one person and the entire model fails. There is good reason to…

lrvick used a recommendation phrase. 2 indexed comments match. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 9:01:12 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year64 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2018-11-03 05:49:00 UTC to 2026-08-08 05:15:45 UTC.

0510152018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20182019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 1 submissions, 3 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 0 submissions, 6 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 0 submissions, 6 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 10 mentions; 0 submissions, 10 comments20222023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 11 mentions; 2 submissions, 9 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 16 mentions; 0 submissions, 16 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 0 submissions, 6 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 0 submissions, 4 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC413
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC606
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC606
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC10010
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC1129
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC16016
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC606
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC404

From the project README

An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.

Read the project’s introduction
NoteDue to the decreased activity in the RFC repository, and as also discussed in the previous meeting notes, we will transition the RFC process to a new on-demand work flow. More info here. Nix RFCs (Request For Comments) Many changes, including bug fixes and documentation improvements can be implemented and reviewed via the normal GitHub pull request workflow. Some changes though are "substantial", and we ask that these be put through a bit of a design process and produce a consensus among the Nix community. When this process is followed This process is followed when one intends to make "substantial" changes to the Nix ecosystem. What constitutes a "substantial" change is evolving based on community norms, but may include the following. Any semantic or syntactic change to the language that is not a bug fix Removing language features Big restructuring of Nixpkgs Expansions to the scope of Nixpkgs (new arch, major subprojects, ...) Introduction of new interfaces or functions Certain changes do not require an RFC: Adding, updating and removing packages in Nixpkgs Fixing security updates and bugs that don't break interfaces Pull requests that contain any of the aforementioned 'substantial' changes may be closed if there is no RFC connected to the proposed changes. Terminology RFC Steering Committee A team of people defined by RFC 36 and stays consistent until the team members are changed via a follow-up RFC. This committee is responsible for forming an RFC Shepherd team from the available nominations on each RFC. This team also names the leader of the Shepherd team. This has to happen within 1 week after the PR has been opened. Until then the Steering Committee is responsible for guiding the discussion. In case of the Shepherding Team not doing its work the Steering Committee shall encourage them or step in and assign new Shepherds. They also are in charge of merging accepted and rejected RFCs. Generally by these expectations they should find time to meet once a week for about an hour. They have no special responsibility with regard to the content of an RFC, they can weigh in on them, the same as any other community member, but are only in charge of: selecting the Shepherds unanimously supervising that the Shepherds are carrying out their work committing the final RFC Shepherd Team A team of 3-4 community members defined unanimously by the RFC Steering Committee, responsible for accepting or rejecting a specific RFC. This team is created per RFC from community members nominated in the discussion on that RFC. This team should be people who are very familiar with the main components touched by the RFC. The author cannot be part of the Shepherd Team. In addition, at most half of the Shepherd Team can be part of the RFC Steering Committee. The responsibility of the team is to guide the discussion as long as it is constructive, new points are brought up and the RFC is iterated on and from time to time summarise the current state of discussion. If this is the case no longer, then the Shepherd Team shall step in with a motion for FCP. Shepherd Leader The person in charge of the RFC process for a specific RFC, and responsible for ensuring the process is followed in a timely fashion. The Shepherd Leader has no special responsibility with regard to moving an undecided Shepherd Team to a certain decision. Final Comment Period (FCP) A period of ten calendar days, which will be called by the Shepherd Team after the RFC has received ample discussion and enough of the tradeoffs have been discussed. The Shepherd Team will propose to either accept or reject the RFC after the FCP. Process from Creation to Merge In short, to get a major change included in Nix or Nixpkgs, one must first get the RFC merged into the RFC repository as a markdown file under the rfcs directory. At that point the RFC is accepted and may be implemented with the goal of eventual inclusion into Nix or Nixpkgs. graph TD Start((Start)) --> Draft Draft -->|Ready for Review| Discuss style Draft fill:#008,color:#FFF Discuss[Discuss and Refine] Discuss ---> |On Hold| Draft Discuss --> |Can't Find Shepherds| NoShepherds Discuss --> |Motion for FCP| FCP NoShepherds[Closed - Lack of Interest]:::closed NoShepherds --> |Renewed Interest| Discuss FCP[Final Comment Phase] FCP --> |FCP Canceled| Discuss FCP --> |Accept| Merged FCP --> |Reject| Rejected Merged style Merged fill:#080,color:#FFF Rejected[Closed - Rejected]:::closed Withdrawn[Closed - Withdrawn]:::closed Discuss & Draft --->|Author Withdraws| Withdrawn classDef closed fill:#800,color:#FFF Loading Have a cool idea! Fill in the RFC. Put care into the details: RFCs that do not present convincing motivation, demonstrate understanding of the impact of the design, or are disingenuous about the drawbacks or alternatives tend to be poorly-received. Consider using Semantic Line Breaks in order to get better diffs on later amendments. Consider publishing your RFC as pre-RFC in the forum to gather initial feedback and iron out the remaining typos. In case your RFC is a technical proposal, you might want to prepare a prototype of your idea to firstly make yourself aware of potential pitfalls and also help reviewers understand the RFC. Code may be able to explain some issues in short. Submit a pull request. As a pull request the RFC will receive design feedback from the larger community, and the author should be prepared to revise it in response. For the nomination process for potential members of the RFC Shepherd Team, that is specific to each RFC, anyone interested can either nominate another person or themselves to be a potential member of the RFC Shepherd Team. This can already be done when submitting the PR. The RFC Steering Committee assigns a subset of the nominees to the RFC Shepherd Team and designates a leader for it. This has to be done unanim
Read the full README on GitHub

What Hacker News says

10 sources
lrvick·Dec 23, 2022
It is trivial, but too many people want NixPkgs to be like NPM with minimal friction so random inexperienced devs that do not know how to generate a keypair can contribute. That lack of friction is why it has so many more packages than most distros, and also why you cannot trust any of them. I tried to appeal to fix this in 2018 as a total outsider but it was endless bike shedding. Most would rather have no signing at all than use the well supported tools every other distro uses with success. https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/pull/34 As a security engineer I lost all interest in NixOS after that. They want it to be a hobby distro run like a wiki, and that is totally fine. It just means we need to discourage it from being used in high security applications. NixOS is a massive step forward in Linux distro design, and a massive step backwards in
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supply chain trust.
In Nix on the Steam Deck
solatic·Apr 25, 2022
As a NixOS user who loves Nix yet struggles with nixpkgs from time to time - The main issue is that nixpkgs is unapproachable to new users. Yes, there is the documentation at https://nixos.org/manual/nixpkgs/stable/ , and it is quite long. It's not enough. Every Nix tutorial basically starts off with "this is how you create a new package. You get your source with either ./. or by using a fetcher to download a release from the Internet. Then you use mkDerivation to package the release by writing the install scripts." OK, cool. Then you want to package a Go program. Cool, let's copy from an example in nixpkgs. Well, stuff in nixpkgs doesn't use mkDerivation, it uses buildGoModule, and it references weird SHA hashes for the vendor? How do you get those? So you go to https://nixos.org/manual/nixpkgs/stable/#ssec-language-go and it doesn't exp
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lain to you how to get the vendor hash. It doesn't explain to you why nixpkgs uses buildGoModule and not mkDerivation. So you don't really know how to continue and you feel pretty stuck. The thing is, a) buildGoModule is a higher-level function that will return the result of mkDerivation in a way that reuses everything that is common to Go modules. So it makes perfect sense from the perspective of a maintainer who wants to reduce the size of nixpkgs as much as possible, which is already one of the largest Git repositories on GitHub. b) Nixpkgs library functions like buildGoModule, with the need to maintain the separate vendor hash, come from a desire to write pure Nix functions without network access, i.e. there is no need to re-download the vendored dependencies if they already exist in the local Nix store cache. Indeed, the fact that there is only a single vendor hash represents a pragmatic compromise; whenever any dependency changes, the entire vendored dependency tree needs to be re-downloaded and rebuilt; if the hashes of the individual dependencies were tracked, then Nix would understand to only download the dependencies which had changed. The reason why Nix can't compute the dependency hashes of each dependency internally, and only then try to check the Nix store and see if they exist there, is because Nix does not yet support recursive calls: https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/13 (nearly ten years old). However, the RFC for adding support was finally merged: https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/pull/92 and so support will come soon enough. So basically: Given that most developers need to produce containers to ship to production, and Nix already makes it possible for developers to ship containers, Nix needs to make it easier for developers to build their services/programs in Nix. Program build support is already pretty great for some specific ecosystems (e.g. Haskell) but for most ecosystems (like the Go example above) it ends up being pretty frustrating for one reason or another, due to lacking language features. Once those features are developed, there's a lot of room to make huge improvements in the various lang2nix projects, and then much more of Nix's value will be accessible to developers.
In How Nix and NixOS get so close to perfect
Ericson2314·Mar 22, 2022
Please check out https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/pull/109 ! I absolutely agree language-specific package managers need better support. Nix RFC 109 is a simple-stupid way to get some "important from derivation" in Nixpkgs, so we can collectively dogfood them "lang2nix" tools and finally make them good. It is really sad to me that many users understandly think "hmm, C is crazy, surely this Nix should be even better with more uniform language ecosystems packages!", only to die on the hell of the lang2nixs all being just not quite good enough. This is huge stumbling block for developement shops that try to use Nix that I want to see removed!
In Ask HN: Who operates at scale without containers?
Ericson2314·Feb 19, 2022
I am not so sure about that. Nixpkgs is a big ball because it is the final integration point. And I do in fact find myself refactoring individual packages and the infra at the same time. https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/pull/109/ I wrote to hopefully make the lang2nix packages work with Nixpkgs. I think this would achieve most of the benefits of what you propose: cleaner separation of infra vs vs ad-hoc per-package stuff, while still retaining the flexibility of the monorepo. The goal is to work with upstream developers so less and less ad-hoc crap is needed. Then the one repo ends up "all stdlib no packages", because the packages are basically autogenerated!
In Nix: An idea whose time has come
Ericson2314·Jan 24, 2022
I understand the first complaint but not the second > The second flaw is that NixOS does not actually provide real isolation. I thought this would going to be about security, but then it was about having to repackage the world. But Nixpkgs is current the biggest and most up to date package repository in the world (we finally beat AUR). Packaging enough stuff is emphatically not the problem. What I want to see is development be easier with Nix, because winning over the hearts and minds of upstream developers is the final frontier. To that end I wrote https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/pull/92 and https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/pull/109. As a side benefit, autogenerating more Nix means less handwritten Nix! I do think people give the language itself to much grief when the problem is more the library side with the copious override shenanagins and
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other stuff.
In The Curse of NixOS

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