In my experience, better tooling always wins in the long run.<p>I've built Debian packages in the past, and after packaging the same software with Nix, it's very hard to not feel that Debian tooling and packaging is time consuming for no good reason.
The nixpkgs model, where all you need to build everything is one `git clone`, all you need to make a change is a pull request and wait for a range of automated tests to tell you it's good (for both build and the _uses_ of a package!), and all you need to land a contributed change is click one button, seems strictly better.<p>Over the years I've heard many people say "but shell scripts, FTP servers and arcane helper tools is the way we've done it for decades and that will never change" in many projects, but eventually, these projects shrink and those with a good developer experience and clean tooling overtake them.<p>Similarly, after experiencing automatic, safe refactoring across billion-line typed-checked code bases, you can't help but wonder why people put up with spending their time going through heoric community efforts distributing work across people that a machine could easily do if you used good tooling.<p>In my opinion, the real strength and legacy of Debian is successfully running a large, diverse, distributed project over decades with (reasonable) cohesion, democracy, and (reasonably) good organisation and project management.<p>But even some non-technical problems go away with good tooling, and more time gets freed up to solve those hard tasks.<p>Concrete example: In nixpkgs it is very easy to build overlays for the whole of NixOS that allow you to switch from dynamic to static linking or add hardening flags across all packages, avoiding big debates over which is the "one true way" because providing both is so easy, and both can be merged upstream.<p>I think any big and successful project should continuously invest into better tooling, and simplify and automate things. That keeps contributors motivated and on board.<p>(14-years happy Ubuntu [and thus Debian] user, and 10-years i3 user, so thanks for your efforts, Michael.)