... kinda like people who pretend that Zig is a competitor to Rust, and conveniently forget to mention that it does not promise memory safety.
I've been seeing a lot of "steal their thunder" type project positioning lately when something is a radical leap forward but requires major effort to learn -- like nix or rust.
People seem to have picked up on a strategy that if you can put together something inferior but easier to understand (zig doesn't need a borrow checker because it's memory-unsafe; ostree doesn't need a language because it ignores dependencies), and market it as an alternative to the radical thing, a much larger group of people will rally around the simpler thing instead of the radical thing because they feel threatened by the new thing that can't be learned in a weekend or even a week, and using only "20%-time" would take six months to master...
I'm going to get downvoted to hades for this, but it's true.
... kinda like people who pretend that Zig is a competitor to Rust, and conveniently forget to mention that it does not promise memory safety.
I think that this comparison is unfair. First of all, the OSTree documentation doesn't pretend that it is something like Nix. It's an object storage for operating system images. Secondly, in contrast go Zig, OSTree most likely wider use/deployments than Nix, since it is used by Fedora CoreOS and Fedora Silverblue.
That said, even though Nix and OSTree are not very similar. For users, there are similar benefits: an immutable system, atomic upgrades/rollbacks, etc.
I think it is also much more likely that OSTree gets into the hands of millions than Nix.
(Disclaimer: I like Nix a lot and am a contributor to nixpkgs.)
> I'm going to get downvoted to hades for this, but it's true.
Yes, because it has nothing to do with Nix, but it's just your own off-topic crusade, and being concerned that when someone tries something different, they're "steal[ing] the thunder" from your own favourite pet project. Talk about feeling threatened.
We can do better than having cults around our little language or package manager but instead learning to appreciate the little differences between each project. Perhaps the solution is in the intersection between the two.
I don't see ostree promote themselves as an alternative to Nix. The GP linked to an explainer of how OStree differs from a bunch of systems, not really a promotional page. And in general OStree's use case is different to Nix so I don't think it competes.
You may be right that this is a pattern, but I don't see it in this case.
I've been seeing a lot of "steal their thunder" type project positioning lately when something is a radical leap forward but requires major effort to learn -- like nix or rust.
People seem to have picked up on a strategy that if you can put together something inferior but easier to understand (zig doesn't need a borrow checker because it's memory-unsafe; ostree doesn't need a language because it ignores dependencies), and market it as an alternative to the radical thing, a much larger group of people will rally around the simpler thing instead of the radical thing because they feel threatened by the new thing that can't be learned in a weekend or even a week, and using only "20%-time" would take six months to master...
I'm going to get downvoted to hades for this, but it's true.