The Nixpkgs core team disbanded on August 7, 2026, ten months after the NixOS Steering Committee created it. Its two remaining members cite failed recruitment and steering committee micromanagement, leaving Nixpkgs governance with no direct owner.
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Transcript
The team that governs Nixpkgs just disbanded. Two people, posting last night, ten months after the NixOS Steering Committee created the team. And Nixpkgs is not a small thing. It's the package set behind NixOS, a hundred and forty thousand packages, and right now twelve thousand three hundred open pull requests. The layer that was supposed to settle disputes above all of that is now empty. They gave three reasons. The job was never the lightweight role they were promised, it ate the time they wanted for actual code. They asked for new members and exactly one person applied. And they say the Steering Committee micromanaged them, took back decisions inside their own remit, and answered slowly. They leave behind nineteen new committers and the project's first AI policy, with nobody assigned to run either. The next election decides if that gets fixed.