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Just using Guix requires a pretty substantial amount of administrative work. I'd imagine maintaining it is even more intense and that's why they're running into

Just using Guix requires a pretty substantial amount of administrative work. I'd imagine maintaining it is even more intense and that's why they're running into issues like this. You have to be pretty slow to be outrun by Debian of all distros.

terminalbraid 1y ago
It's not the slowness of releases, it's the fact they don't release any stable version with just security fixes. They only make new cumulative releases. Debian's model is to fix a version for their release and do security patches on that, not to push out the latest version.
- guga42k 1y ago
  I would guess this is the same reason why one can't change git repo history without affecting people working with the repo. Merkle tree all over the store.
  - lmz 1y ago
    Merkle trees don't prohibit release / patch-only branches. Or multiple heads in general.
spit2wind 1y ago
What do you mean by "Just using Guix requires a pretty substantial amount of administrative work." Like, as a user downloading packages, or a person packaging an application? As a user downloading a package, it's been super easy for me and it's been years of running Guix with little to no issue (yet the benefits of rolling release, rollbacks, installing multiple versions of a given software etc.). As for using it to package an application, I found the challenges mainly in the documentation. This was years ago and a lot of work has gone into improving the docs. I'm curious what your experience has been.
- ocdtrekkie 1y ago
  FWIW, not the OP but doing a guix pull after getting it from APT took several hours to crash out every time I wanted to just try using guix for something, and the ISO to install it from upstream was multiple gigabytes which seemed wild. I put a couple days into it and never actually got to try it. It's hard to have an opinion of a platform you haven't used but based on how bloated just starting it seemed to be I was unimpressed.
  - pxc 1y ago
    > the ISO to install it from upstream was multiple gigabytes which seemed wild. For the record, the Guix System install media is less than 1 GB. And the Guix installer from upstream looks to be 100 MB right now.

terminalbraid 1y ago

It's not the slowness of releases, it's the fact they don't release any stable version with just security fixes. They only make new cumulative releases. Debian's model is to fix a version for their release and do security patches on that, not to push out the latest version.

guga42k 1y ago
I would guess this is the same reason why one can't change git repo history without affecting people working with the repo. Merkle tree all over the store.
- lmz 1y ago
  Merkle trees don't prohibit release / patch-only branches. Or multiple heads in general.

spit2wind 1y ago

What do you mean by "Just using Guix requires a pretty substantial amount of administrative work." Like, as a user downloading packages, or a person packaging an application? As a user downloading a package, it's been super easy for me and it's been years of running Guix with little to no issue (yet the benefits of rolling release, rollbacks, installing multiple versions of a given software etc.). As for using it to package an application, I found the challenges mainly in the documentation. This was years ago and a lot of work has gone into improving the docs. I'm curious what your experience has been.

ocdtrekkie 1y ago
FWIW, not the OP but doing a guix pull after getting it from APT took several hours to crash out every time I wanted to just try using guix for something, and the ISO to install it from upstream was multiple gigabytes which seemed wild. I put a couple days into it and never actually got to try it. It's hard to have an opinion of a platform you haven't used but based on how bloated just starting it seemed to be I was unimpressed.
- pxc 1y ago
  > the ISO to install it from upstream was multiple gigabytes which seemed wild. For the record, the Guix System install media is less than 1 GB. And the Guix installer from upstream looks to be 100 MB right now.