I’m lucky to be in touch with a lot of people that use Nix day to day.
One of the most occouring annoyances that pops up more frequently with those starting with Nix are confusing error messages.
Since Nix community has previously succesfully stepped up and funded removal of Perl to reduce barriers for source code contributions, I think we ought to do the same for removing barriers when using Nix.
In the end of 2019 I’ve made a public call to see if anyone is interested in doing all the hard work and I was happy to get quite a few people willing to help!
Ben Burdette stood out with his 15 years of C++ experience and Elm (known for human error messages).
In last few months he went through all Nix issues and collected those that could be fixed (or improved) with better error messages and created a proposal:
- Read the proposal (and suggest improvements via Edit button on Github).
- Crowdfunding campaign for improving Nix error messages
Domen