I wanted to remind people about this drama from the creator of HA, Frenck toward Nix maintainers packaging Home-Assistant in nixpkgs.
If he behaves in this immature, dictatorial way, it is not a stretch to think that he will eventually close his source code and/or cash in on the popularity of his open source software like the Pi Foundation and OpenAI did to differing degrees.
TLDR; Frenck is convinced that he has the right to unilaterally mandate how people package his free, open source software and, in my opinion, will most likely behave with similar lack of integrity/lack of transparency with regards to profiteering off of his work eventually. We should fork the project ASAP to protect it from the power-hungry Luddite in charge (that reminds me of Spez).
The only side I’m going to come down on is that a lot of the home assistant maintainer community have a serious attitude problem.
They want to outwardly act as if they want to build a user friendly home automation system for all. But there’s a lot of self important snark in the forums when devs cause problems and users complain. They still act as if they are building this software for free and if anyone doesn’t like how they are doing things they can sod off. But now they have a decent sized paid staff and a mission statement to make the software for every day users.
Their documentation also leaves a lot to be desired and they don’t seem to have any procedures in place for getting it updated before breaking changes.
@demesisx Melodramatic to say the least.
#homeassistantThis drama is from 2021. HA is still open source and has been great.
The Nix maintainers come off pretty entitled in this one. They ignore advice, requests and do not provide an engineering solution that could solve this without incurring the cost HA would bear. You don’t get to dictate or create work for an open source project that wasn’t designed to play well in your environment. If you want to get it to play nice in there, come up with a proposal that the upstream accepts and implement it. Better yet, come up with a design of your system that accommodates the upstream project. If you go ahead and create that work anyway, upstream can use the tools at their disposal to prevent that.
This drama is from 2021.
Oh.
Well.
Then.Now it’s pretty clear why we should (see OP) fork as soon as possible NOW !!!1!111
Knowing almost nothing about “Nix”: I am inclined to say this is just one person who is REALLY REALLY REALLY angry that they were not properly respected and were ever told no and blah blah blah. Hence the clear vendetta and… calling the HA devs luddite terrorists…
Would genuinely love a perspective on this from someone with basic people skills who understands what the nix devs actually wanted/needed to know if that was reasonable. But all signs point to “no” and “spray them with deodorant while you are at it”
You don’t get to dictate or create work for an open source project that wasn’t designed to play well in your environment.
It doesn’t matter how it was designed. The purpose of Nix is to get it to work in our world. We don’t request any changes to packages and pride ourselves on being able to build things without the involvement of the original team. I think I am going to repeat this point a few more times….
come up with a proposal that the upstream accepts and implement it.
that goes against Nix philosophy. They ask nothing of Frenck.
Better yet, come up with a design of your system that accommodates the upstream project.
That is literally what nix is. We pride ourselves on building any project without the involvement of nor asking anything of the original creator.
Probably an unpopular opinion, but:
If users experiencing issues with the ambee library in this package, they will knock on my door. And I’m not willing to support that or accept that burden. Especially as I don’t see a good repacking reason in this case.
As a developer, this seems like a reasonable argument to me.
Also, I see from a comment you made recently that you seem to be involved with NixOS:
There’s always Nix but the dev behind HA has a personal vendetta against Nix people building his software (for some ridiculously stupid reason…he doesn’t understand the tech!). We packaged home assistant in nixpkgs anyway because we don’t negotiate with terrorists.
Calling him a terrorist is rather melodramatic. And I think further enforces his point, that your actions are creating unnecessary problems for others, and you simply don’t care.
Edit:
Did Frenck come off as a bit of an asshole? Yes. But in my opinion, so did all of the NixOS people. Kind of a bad situation all around.
Agreed. If an operating system I don’t support for my software was redirecting its users with issues to my front door I’d cut them off too if they didn’t want to help. Two way street friends. If they wanted to vilify me over it I’d happily terminate communication with them.
Nobody’s stopping you from forking.
But that’s hard…
Is there anything newer than 2021 here?
First, this seems to be three years old. Second, he is one of the contributors to HA, HA was originally started by Paulus Schoutsen who is still an active contributor.
Nuance:
Paulus SchoutsenFounder of Home Assistant:
Closing topic.
Original poster had no intention to contribute anything positively.
Nix closes issues on their repository to force issue here, but it’s not our issue. They do things that are unsupported and are running into issues. That’s why it’s unsupported.
We actively reduce the scope of what we support to reduce maintenance burden. We’re not interested in user requirements prevailing at the cost of our maintainers. Our current supported options support all common use cases and we’re not going to expand this at this point.
Is there any viable alternatives?
OpenHAB was OK the last time I used it. I’m not sure what other big options there are.
Maybe try to understand his point first?
From what I’ve gathered, Nix will create an immutable state of HA, but HA requires for additional packages to be downloaded - which NixOS doesn’t support/allow.
So users will end up with a broken HA install.
And guess where they will file bug reports about this? (Hint: It won’t be Nix…)
That immutable state considers the lock files of ALL the dependencies listed and needed to build the software. You don’t seem to understand the technology enough to weigh in.
It downloads them then compares them with the expected hashes. If they don’t match, it literally won’t build.
You don’t seem to understand the technology enoug
Ah. So there are even more people whose fault is that they do not understand…
;-)
From what I gather here you have a particular flavor of a distribution that does not work with a foss piece of software. This is not uncommon.
Developers have finite time and energy to put into the development of their platform and likely spend that time supporting their existing user base. Just because you took the time to learn esperanto and think it is a superior language does not mean everyone else must cater to your whims.
Based on your statements you seem to “understand” nix… Instead of demanding they cater to your needs: Perhaps you should undertake the burden of forking, modifying the code, and supporting the vast ecosystem of addons then. Surely it would be a trivial matter.
That’s the thing that NONE of you get. We literally don’t need anything nor are we asking anything of Frenck. We packaged Home-Assistant and there it sits in nixpkgs without ANY involvement from Frenck.
and that’s what YOU don’t understand:
you take his software and put it on your platform, without supporting it propperly…
don’t package it, if you are not willing to support it. simple as that…
I probably don’t know enough about the project, but how can it know what requirements plugins installed at a later time have?
Python generates hashed lock files of every dependency it builds. It simply queries that and matches that against its own builds. If they’re not using lock files and such, there are MUCH bigger problems in that project. ;)
Plugin systems don’t rely on lock files, they’re not part of the build at all.
Wow. I stand corrected. That’s actually scary. Has anyone mentioned a solution to this glaring issue? It’s fairly trivial to do that by the way. All that needs to happen is to hash the output of each plugin and the version numbers and compatibility issues would be easier to understand and reproducible.
I’m guessing that those plugins have their own nix derivations that are handled in a more reliable manner. No wonder the dude has extra technical debt popping up! He hasn’t even thought to atomically declare his dependencies.
I understood the point well. The author (and perhaps you) don’t seem to. The technical issues he outlined show a lack of understanding about how nix works with Pypi dependencies. Nix builds EVERYTHING and uses the hashes and lock files from the package. It builds the EXACT versions of PIP packages that the original package used. So any dependencies that the author created point to the hashes that nixpkgs expects. There should be zero difference between the two since they are hashed using inputs. In conclusion, Frenck was being a dick because he didn’t understand Nix and hashed atomic build systems.
If someone from nixpkgs goes to him about something breaking, it is literally because his code broke something. The only possible failure on the nixpkgs part would be not bumping the pkg version of a dependency quick enough…but this is a non-issue since home-assistant pkg builds all of those in its derivation FROM HA’s lock files.
renck was being a dick because he didn’t understand Nix
Sorry but it makes no sense to me.
Please tell me: why in the world should a developer (of free software) invest any of his time into trying to understand what some packager/distributor does with his product?
Well, mostly for comms. You don’t want a flood of people getting pissed off at your project(s) for being poorly distributed and/or broken.
But it is a flood of people using a project in a way that it never was intended to be used in the first place.
Yes, HA is “weird” because it is an open source project that actually has significant amounts of funding (to which I contribute). But this isn’t a case of the authors and org deciding to support a new distribution platform. This is a case of a subset of community members deciding it should support that distribution platform and insisting that the project spin up knowledge and support for it.
That last part is wrong. Nixpkgs asks NOTHING of the maintainers of the original packages. We pride ourselves on being able to RELIABLY build any software out there using only what is available to build the package normally. We just add steps to make that REPRODUCIBLE because we think that is important. If someone went to Frenck about the issues, they certainly weren’t directed there by nixpkgs people.
Nixpkgs asks NOTHING of the maintainers of the original packages.
No, no, no. You just said above that the problem is because the developer did not understand something that nixos does or wants or whatever.
Yeah. He came to the nix people bitching because he didn’t understand their technology and chose to be mean rather than direct the questions to nixpkgs. He tried to obfuscate his code to punish nix people which goes directly against the open source license.
Maybe don’t come to them bitching if you don’t understand what you’re talking about?
Sure Jan.
Look. I don’t know much about your project or what it’s goals or ideology are. What I do know is that your behavior is tainting it and making me think your entire community are assists who call people terrorists for not supporting you.
Think about that
You should probably write a version of that to Frenck and yourself too. I’m just here pointing out shitty anti-open source behavior. Not sure how they makes me culpable…. But go off qween.
His code breaking something, or him not understanding a system he’s not involved with doesn’t mean he is obligated to listen to complaints or fix it for free.
No one said he was. No one said that. They literally said, “direct any issues to the nixpkgs maintainer”.
Then what is the point of all this flailing? If he’s not supposed to fix it or listen. Then fork it and shut the fuck up? This whole post is just to throw shade at someone it seems.
It obviously is.
Frenck actually deserves it.
Get a grip. You are too emotionally invested. You can fork the project right now and ask nothing of the original dev. So maybe follow your own philosophy and leave HA alone. It sounds like you want this to work on NixOS but dont want to maintain a fork.
What compounded the issue was that one of the nixpkgs maintainers had been closing all relevant issues, which redirects the discussion to HA forums. No matter how many times it is repeated “we at NixOS have no intention on putting extra work on the developer”, the actions speak differently.
One or more maintainers later apologized, judging downthread it seems this was mostly resolved amicably between the people involved. No reason to get upset about it again three years later.
I’m not upset. I just think these kinds of anti-open source actions should be well-known by such a large, popular community centered around a project that could potentially have their source code closed and monetized at the drop of a hat.
This ^^ I thought this whole controversy was because they don’t support the HA nix package BUT when people use it and their HA instance breaks…they go to homeassistant support… Doesn’t sound like a dictator but just saying they don’t support that nix package etc. ?
What? No no no no… You don’t understand. NixOS is hot shit, how can they be wrong in any way…
@Mic92 I will re-license and bump the dependency in a way that you guys can’t distribute. Mainly because of not playing nice.
Thanks 👍
What an asshole.
He was specifically instructed in the linked pr to change the license terms, I don’t see how that makes him the asshole here.
He wasn’t instructed to do so, it was a statement that while they wanted to work together and address his concerns if possible, ultimately if he only offers up a “dont do it at all”, they are within their rights unless he moves away from open source.
