Comment by anttiharju

re: forks for one person

I've recently started to contribute to open source, mostly just to add some tiny feature or such

I did not realise before this that getting your changes upstreamed can take a long time. Now I have even more respect for the likes of Asahi Linux. The code reviews usually improve the change a lot but it's not like coding at a company where best case you are able to get multiple changes deployed a day on repos your team does not even own.

But I feel it's worth the effort. For as long as my changes are not upstreamed I can keep using the forked version or just tolerate not being able to do something.

But the major issue I keep running into is how the build setup is painful. This is where Nix really comes to the rescue though. I can import the nixpkgs setup for the given project, point it to my forl/branch, and rebuild the software into my cachix for use in dev shells and containers.

I wish more people used nix. I would love to see it getting adopted as a backend for other package managers. Just maintaing a binary cache for your distro and it would be more or less the same.

But I suppose there are arguments against a monoculture as well.