The bikes have been shed: The official Nix formatter
The history of how the official Nix formatter was successfully established, along with its struggles and lessons.
We go over:
- How Nix didn't have a formatter for its first 15 years before the first ones were written
- How an RFC to standardise the formatter took 3 years, 50 meetings and 600 comments to get accepted
- How one of the most active codebases with 40k Nix files and 15k monthly commits got fully reformatted
- What problems still exist and what the future of Nix formatting holds