Hi, On Sat, Jun 7, 2025, at 9:00 AM, Steve George wrote: > But, the difficulty is > we can't satisfy the timing of the two needs: > > 1. Guix installed *from* a distribution package, hosted on top of > another distribution > 2. Guix as a Linux distribution > > We are both an upstream (for a distro to package Guix) and a downstream > (for us to package upstream software into packages). > > The Survey showed that about 50% adopt Guix as a distro, and 36% as a > hosted package manager. So, overall I think the timing leans towards > making it easier for Guix to be a Linux distro. >
My point here is that the versions of Gnome, KDE, etc. in a release of the Guix *installer* do not affect desktop Guix users after their first `guix pull && guix system reconfigure`. No matter how old the installer is, running those commands will always get the latest (packaged) version of the desktop, along with everything else. The Guix package archive operates on a rolling-release basis, which this GCD does not propose to change. Therefore, we will still recommend that users run `guix pull` as soon as possible on installation and regularly thereafter: it is the only way to get security updates, for example. So, if a release installer includes an older version of some desktop, I would expect it to be updated by the first reboot. Trying to get the latest and greatest desktop *before* the first reboot seems like a low priority to me. Additionally, I would hope decoupling the release cycle from the desktop teams' updates, which are significant undertakings, would reduce the friction of regular releases. In contrast, the version of Guix in an LTS distro package is likely to be in use for a couple years. Overall, since Guix will continue to work most like a rolling-release distro, the effort of a fixed release seems to me to require an especially compelling justification to meet a need of carefully restricted scope. I can see that justification for occasional especially-thoroughly-tested versions of Guix itself and the Guix System installer. But I don't see a benefit to widening the scope beyond packages needed to install the system and run `guix pull && guix system reconfigure`. In fact, if a release prominently announced features like updated desktops (as a Debian release might), I can see some concern into misleading users into thinking that they should stay on the "released version" and not receive security updates and bugfixes. Philip
