Hello, As someone who’s been recently involved in packaging some software for GNU Guix I’m confused with certain choices, mostly with the [package]-next category. What should these next packages be? "More recent" than the non-next package? If so, how much more recent? One release ahead? Or is it supposed to follow the latest master release from the source repository of the package, and the non-next package would be the stable one?
None of the above options seem to satisfy, emacs-next does not follow the latest master, but it further away than one release from the stable. So what exactly does emacs-next follow for being updated? This is not only confusing, but I believe creating issues in packaging as well, someone has even consdiered packaging a "emacs-nextnext" [0]. A better solution is necessary, at least if not that we should decide what and how should the "next" packages be provided and packaged, emacs-next doesn’t even have a description. The next packages should have a _distinct_ description from the non-next ones, so that when the user is installing it they know that they’re installing not a stable, or more recent or whatever we decide as the distinguishing element between the two categories. I’ve seen similar issues in trying to upgrade the ghc package as well, the ghc-next isn’t clear as to what its following [1]. A clearance of these confusions would be better for both package maintainers and end-users who don’t see much beyond the description, version and do `guix install'. [1]: https://issues.guix.gnu.org/issue/47335 [0]: https://issues.guix.gnu.org/73281 Regards, -- Divya Ranjan, Philosophy, Mathematics, Libre Software.
