2026-07-27 – Governance weekly

Realistic expectations about Darwin [raito]

Darwin is slow, reducing productivity, and often broken
Darwin is maintained on a best-effort basis
- if it breaks we might disable CI on it
Make an announcement looking for Darwin maintainers
No capacity for maintaining the Lix installer for Darwin

Discussion:

Decision: Every time Darwin is in the way, we take reasonable steps to get it out of the way (trying a simple fix, then removing entirely Darwin from CI or removing that feature out of Lix for Darwin, etc.)
Action item: Announce current state of maintenance [raito]

Discussion:

is Darwin releng fixable?
- yes(?) but is work
- fix releng for linux
- let community do darwin
horrors: Trying to keep the installer maintained might not be worth it, given Rust and RPC on the horizon which might cause lots of regressions
- raito: Scoping down might make it viable, with some CI improvements
No installer means no Lix support for non-NixOS
- horrors: Acceptable for the time being

Decision: Lix installer is not a blocker for 2.96 release, fixing issues is not a priority (status quo)
Decision: Lix installer is not a priority for the Lix project, unless a person can come and own this piece of software for the Lix project, albeit, we believe that the current contributing landscape makes it very unlikely to have such a person show up until the Lix project works on its contributer onboarding experience
Action item: work on improving the developer experience of the Lix installer [raito]
- support Linux builds from a Linux workstation

We should post a public statement about LLM policy as there was some quite confusion about delroth made their post in the AFNix Zulip, we should not leave those points unanswered publicly

Discussion:

Be mindful about how the announcement will be done w.r.t. the other topics that also need to be announced
- Proposal rootile: Put out the statement first and wait with the other announcements
Proposal raito: There were internal disagreements on the LLM policy across the team, which have been resolved

Decision: we will make an announcement to address delroth's AFNix Zulip message and advertise the new Lix's AI policy by 2 weeks (2026-08-10).
Action item: draft the announcement and show it to the rest of the core team.
- bullet points plan for the announcement [rootile]
- copy editing [raito or piegames]

Discussion:

Focus on onboarding contributors over looking for people directly on the core team
Discuss a path/process for becoming core team member
Non-technical work that needs done
- Documentation, testing
- Public comms
- Administration
- Might require sponsoring

Decision: we agree that all these items needs to be communicated, except for recruiting directly more core team members; for this one, we would like to take more time to evaluate how we do this
Decision: roadmap looks ok, but other core team members will take a look again and approve it again
Action item: write down drafts for each of these items and have core team review them [raito]
Action item: discuss a path or a process to become core team member and expectations on a core team member in a future weekly [raito]
Action item: figure out how to attract non-technical people to work on non-technical items, including sponsoring if needed [raito]

Revision #1
Created 2026-07-27 17:40:44 UTC by piegames
Updated 2026-07-27 17:41:17 UTC by piegames