Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Removing Guix from Debian

lwn.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 49 posts

Re: Removing Guix from Debian

#31

Post by spit2wind »

msgodel wrote: post #10
tucnak wrote: post #3

It's a shame that yet another project (bcachefs in Linux kernel) and now guix are getting ostracized out of mismanagement... on whoever's part, although in all honestly, and this is a hot take mind you; guix should either be run on bare metal, to take advantage of its bootstrap-from-source, thus avoiding debian in the first place, OR be running as guest, in some fantasical gnu hurd environment, thus forgoing linux. I…

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.

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.

Re: Removing Guix from Debian

#32

Post by opello »

opello wrote: post #11
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely if that's all they would just build with an explicit -std=whatever setting?

Looking at the build log in the linked Debian issue, there is an argument setting -std=c++11. It seems as though an implicit inclusion of had been provided by libstdc++ in the past and was removed as of GCC 15. https://github.com/bpftrace/bpftrace/pull/3407 https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc-patches/2024-August/659176... Looks like they did in fact add the header detail to the porting guide: https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-15…

Just closing some tabs and followed this trail a bit further, it looks like guix fixed the issue too:

https://codeberg.org/guix/guix/commit/7b66b41ce5cee48b14eb6c...

Re: Removing Guix from Debian

#33

Post by dspillett »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #22
cestith wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The locales package has over 265k installs in the same recent report that lists 231 copies of guix. That’s less than 0.09% or so.

By the same virtue, https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=firefox only lists 5749 installs of firefox. I'd take it with a grain of salt.

That is still more than an order of magnitude higher (2.17% rather than 0.09%).

And FF ESR is the more common by far (44.5%) as it is the default, people only install the other FF package if they have specific need to be closer to the leading edge. The build environments for the two will be very close, at least compared to the oddities being reported in the Guix requirements, so the hassle of maintaining FF and FF-ESR compared to just one of them is not going to be comparatively large compared to maintaining packages for just one of the pair.

Re: Removing Guix from Debian

#34

Post by stocksinsmocks »

Arcuru wrote: post #15

> According to Debian's popularity contest (popcon) statistics, there are not quite 230 systems with Guix installed.

Perhaps, but there is a certain charm in a single individuals obsessive devotion to a problem nobody else sees. I like that the Linux ecosystem is weird.

Re: Removing Guix from Debian

#35

Post by dspillett »

JohnFen wrote: post #17
Arcuru wrote: post #15

> According to Debian's popularity contest (popcon) statistics, there are not quite 230 systems with Guix installed.

But most people using Debian turn popcon off. I don't at all doubt that Guix is not used by most people, but I'm quite certain the number of users is well above 230.

You just have to assume that the install balance between those with it on is not massively different to the install balance between those who do not. This might not be the safest application of statistics, but it is the best available.

If more Guix users want to be seen and counted, to show how much of a need there might be to keep it despite the current issues, then there is a simple thing they can do… Or a less simple thing: the “without a community nor help” part seems rather significant to me in “But the Debian package maintainer has the almost impossible task to backport all the security fixes without a community nor help behind [maintaining it] and as things are going, this will probably lead to the Debian guix package being removed”.

Re: Removing Guix from Debian

#36

Post by Eduard »

why not bring Debian's guix version to closely follow vanilla guix's releases? Is it because Debian wants to guarantee that a Debian release (such as trixie) only provides packages that stick to at most bugfix versions such that there are no breaking changes introduced?

Re: Removing Guix from Debian

#37

Post by kwk1 »

Eduard wrote: post #36

why not bring Debian's guix version to closely follow vanilla guix's releases? Is it because Debian wants to guarantee that a Debian release (such as trixie) only provides packages that stick to at most bugfix versions such that there are no breaking changes introduced?

It could have been possible to upload something like a 1.4.0+git2025mmdd package, if not for the timing of the CVE announcement with regards to Debian's release freeze.

Re: Removing Guix from Debian

#38

Post by mac-attack »

lucb1e wrote: post #29
Valodim wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't really complain if their usage stats aren't taken into account then, I'd say?

Or just to take the raw data with a grain of salt because some people care about privacy and haven't had time to read up on what the privacy policy is for example. That doesn't automatically mean these people stop being worth considering as legit users of the software

FYI, privacy questions are here if you ever get the time: https://popcon.debian.org/FAQ

Re: Removing Guix from Debian

#39

Post by ocdtrekkie »

spit2wind wrote: post #31
msgodel wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

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.

Re: Removing Guix from Debian

#40

Post by lmz »

guga42k wrote: post #28
terminalbraid wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Merkle trees don't prohibit release / patch-only branches. Or multiple heads in general.
Post reply on HN