--- title: The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded | daily.dev description: The Nixpkgs core team has announced its disbandment after 10 months of operation, citing unsustainable workload and systemic governance issues with the NixOS... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/the-nixpkgs-core-team-has-disbanded-836a9xutd twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded | daily.dev og:description: The Nixpkgs core team has announced its disbandment after 10 months of operation, citing unsustainable workload and systemic governance issues with the NixOS... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/the-nixpkgs-core-team-has-disbanded-836a9xutd og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/836a9XUTD.png og:image:alt: The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 5 min read · 2 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary The Nixpkgs core team has announced its disbandment after 10 months of operation, citing unsustainable workload and systemic governance issues with the NixOS Steering Committee. During their tenure, the team onboarded 19 new committers, reformed the committer delegation process, extended the merge bot, secured a GitHub Enterprise Cloud upgrade, and established an initial automation/AI policy. The team attributes their dissolution to the Steering Committee's failure to effectively delegate, chronic communication problems, micromanagement, and insufficient support — making it impossible to fulfill their constitutional mandate. They express hope that future governance efforts will achieve genuine, lightweight delegation to technically-focused teams. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Questions this post answers ### Why did the Nixpkgs core team disband? The Nixpkgs core team disbanded due to unsustainable workload and systemic dysfunction with the NixOS Steering Committee. Key issues included the SC's micromanagement of delegated teams, chronic poor communication, slow responses to concerns, and inadequate coordination on matters like GSoC, grants, and AI policy. With only one applicant responding to a call for new members, the team concluded that continuing was untenable. _Developers following Nix ecosystem governance track developments like these on daily.dev._ ### What did the Nixpkgs core team accomplish before disbanding? Over 10 months, the Nixpkgs core team reformed the committer delegation process and onboarded 19 new committers, extended the merge bot to empower maintainers, re-established contact with GitHub and secured a sponsored Enterprise Cloud upgrade, helped triage security advisory GHSA-67f2-674w-6g63, and established an initial automation/AI policy that received strong cross-community approval. _Contributors watching the Nixpkgs ecosystem can follow governance and tooling changes on daily.dev._ ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 2 discussions and 116 comments across hackernews, lobsters (as of 2026-09-14). **TL;DR:** The community is largely critical, viewing the disbandment as another symptom of deep, persistent governance dysfunction in the Nix ecosystem — though many note that Nixpkgs itself will continue and the core team's technical accomplishments were real. A significant thread runs through the discussion lamenting contributor burnout and the project's inability to retain good people. **Sentiment:** 15% positive · 35% mixed · 50% skeptical **The case for** - The team accomplished meaningful work in a short time: onboarding committers, reforming delegation, and extending automation. - Nixpkgs and Nix itself will continue functioning as before — the disbanded team was less than a year old. - Some contributors report that day-to-day package contributions and PRs continue rolling in unaffected by governance drama. **The pushback** - The disbandment is seen as another domino in a long pattern of burnout and resignations pointing to systemic steering-committee dysfunction. - The governance structure is described as micromanaging and failing to genuinely delegate, making volunteer roles unsustainable. - The community's ongoing political conflicts have made it difficult to recruit new people to governance roles. - Several long-time contributors report having already left or reduced involvement due to the toxic atmosphere. - Docs remain fragmented and poor, and 'experimental' features like flakes remain in limbo — eroding confidence for new adopters. **Hottest debate:** Whether the governance failures are a fixable structural problem or a deeper cultural/political rot that has permanently damaged the community's ability to self-organize. **Open questions** - Will the Steering Committee reform its delegation practices, or will the next governance attempt collapse the same way? - Who, if anyone, will step up to fill the nixpkgs core team role given how badly the previous team burned out? - Is Determinate Systems or another commercial actor positioned to effectively take over stewardship if community governance continues to fail? **Highlights** > Correct, but it's another domino in a broader trend that appears to have a common root. It was only a year ago that the moderation team mass resigned pointing the finger at the steering committee [1]. It's not been the same people for the last two years, but clearly there must be systemic issues in the people getting elected to this board for there to be so many persistent problems. Also see roberth's resignation [2], and Gabriella439's retrospective [3], and then there's Jon Ringer's thing, the list goes on. [1]: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/a-statement-from-members-of-th... [2]: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/stepping-down-from-the-nix-tea... [3]: https://haskellforall.com/2025/09/steering-committee-retrosp... > — [aliasxneo on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49219212) > “Our experience is that the Steering Committee as an institution lacks a native instinct for the delegation envisioned by the constitution, while also not being sufficiently engaged and cohesive to handle individual decisions at those levels itself.” This is an almost poetic description of micromanagement. I really like Nix and have been running it as my main OS for several years in the past ~ 10 years. I don’t think the issues they have are unsolvable, it just appears that the governance model they’re trying to have is not working out, and it’s very difficult to roll back. > — [stingraycharles on hackernews · 2 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49218315) > For anyone reading this and jumping to a broader conclusion: the Nixpkgs core team disbanding does not mean Nixpkgs or Nix is dying. It does mean that this particular structure was not sustainable, very important contributors burnt out and we need to do better, faster. We need to continue learning from this and continue building a stronger ecosystem that prioritizes the contributors who are the only reason any of this is possible. Personally, I'm sorry and grateful. Sorry that it ended in core folks being burnt out. Grateful since they did some of the most amazing work, more than anyone can imagine two people doing. > — [ronef on hackernews · 3 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49218493) > Nix ran for many years with very little to no structure. This worked fine as long as the community has some cohesion around it being a FOSS project. But political divisiveness happened around 2021 and crept into the community. You're still seeing the fallout of https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/pull/98 > — [jonringer117 on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49219070) > YMMV, I don’t run a home lab, I just have a NAS and run a personal website. I definitely don’t have a “fleet”. I have two servers running Debian and I can bring them back up from zero in <30 minutes. “Rebuild everything in one command and have it work” is not something that I’m chasing after and I am skeptical that it would work anyway. Maybe there is something I’m missing, but when I update the software, the updates come with changes and it’s possible that things break. My goals are to keep reasonably up to date and to be able to fix things quickly if they do break. Regarding Nix complaints: Package maintenance is kind of a crapshoot. Maybe your package is in nixpkgs, maybe there is a flake for it, maybe you find something that is actively updated, maybe not. Maybe there is a package but half the features are turned off because the maintainer didn’t bother. Maybe there is a package but half the features are turned off on macOS for unknown reasons. What I want is just to know what level of distro-level maintenance the package has, including its transitive dependencies. Docs are just kinda bad. Fragmented across different sites. Docs teaching you Nix forwards or backwards, or teaching old Nix, or teaching Nix with flakes, or teaching you Nix for end-users or developers or package maintainers, or Nix on Mac or NixOS. A surprising number of broken links. What I want is one site, with a little drop-down menu to select the version I am using. What I have is hours spent on the NixOS Discord trying to figure out how to do basic stuff. > — [klodolph on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49218701) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49217993) · 245 points · 114 comments - [lobsters](https://lobste.rs/s/9cv8me/nixpkgs_core_team_has_disbanded) · 14 points · 2 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [How to piss off your Nix friends](https://daily.dev/posts/how-to-piss-off-your-nix-friends-qtia6op0d) · Farid Zakaria’s Blog · 3 upvotes · 0 comments - [Driving open governance: What the Technical Steering Committee accomplished this year](https://daily.dev/posts/driving-open-governance-what-the-technical-steering-committee-accomplished-this-year-ygmpvy6vl) · OpenSearch · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [NixOS 26.05 released](https://daily.dev/posts/nixos-26-05-released-qcmijrggw) · Lobsters · 6 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#open-source](https://daily.dev/tags/open-source), [#nixos](https://daily.dev/tags/nixos) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/the-nixpkgs-core-team-has-disbanded-836a9xutd) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/the-nixpkgs-core-team-has-disbanded-836a9xutd","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/the-nixpkgs-core-team-has-disbanded-836a9xutd"},"datePublished":"2026-08-08T02:20:02.536Z","dateModified":"2026-09-14T09:07:57.488Z","description":"The Nixpkgs core team has announced its disbandment after 10 months of operation, citing unsustainable workload and systemic governance issues with the NixOS...","image":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--HRgLpUt6--/f_auto/v1722860399/public/Placeholder%2003","thumbnailUrl":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--HRgLpUt6--/f_auto/v1722860399/public/Placeholder%2003","isAccessibleForFree":true,"articleSection":"Hacker News","inLanguage":"en","publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180}},"author":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Hacker News","logo":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/t_logo,f_auto/v1/logos/hn","url":"https://daily.dev/sources/hn"},"commentCount":0,"discussionUrl":"https://daily.dev/posts/the-nixpkgs-core-team-has-disbanded-836a9xutd","interactionStatistic":[{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"LikeAction"},"userInteractionCount":2},{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"CommentAction"},"userInteractionCount":0}],"keywords":"open-source,nixos","timeRequired":"PT5M"} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https://daily.dev"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Hacker News","item":"https://daily.dev/sources/hn"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"name":"The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded"}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"FAQPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/the-nixpkgs-core-team-has-disbanded-836a9xutd#faq","mainEntity":[{"@type":"Question","name":"Why did the Nixpkgs core team disband?","acceptedAnswer":{"@type":"Answer","text":"The Nixpkgs core team disbanded due to unsustainable workload and systemic dysfunction with the NixOS Steering Committee. 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