Moving to beta? When?

Moving to beta? When?

[Christopher Allan Webber]

Hello all,

Guix is super stable for me these days.  In a sense, more stable than
any other system I've ever run.  We also are quickly moving to the point
where *most* core packages people need are there.

I think the Alpha label is too conservative.  Once gnome-shell lands, or
once the next release comes out, what do people think about Beta?

That still sounds like "not quite production ready for everyone" but
Alpha hardly feels fair to Guix anymore.  (The most alpha thing about
GuixSD thing at this point is the install process, and hey, it's like
going oldschool with my install again.... :))

Or, when to switch?
 - Chris

Re: Moving to beta? When?

[Efraim Flashner]

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On Fri, 18 Dec 2015 19:40:29 -0600
Christopher Allan Webber <cwebber@dustycloud.org> wrote:

> Hello all,
> 
> Guix is super stable for me these days.  In a sense, more stable than
> any other system I've ever run.  We also are quickly moving to the point
> where *most* core packages people need are there.
> 
> I think the Alpha label is too conservative.  Once gnome-shell lands, or
> once the next release comes out, what do people think about Beta?

I was going to save it for a 0.10 vs 1.0 debate, but here makes sense also :)
I think it also comes down to what are we missing? Not necessarily for beta,
but more as a list between "here" and "1.0 worthy."

gnome(-shell) and kde: I think many people would expect these

installer: I haven't looked at the gentoo or archlinux installer recently,
but ours looks similar in terms of "here's a shell, go ahead and bootstrap
it." Also we have some lingering issues like /home on a different partition,
actually partitioning and formatting the device, and maybe more.

guix pull: super slow as-is :) going back to the gentoo comparison, iirc
gentoo rsyncs the svn repo, and we all know how fast `git pull && make` is.

anything else?

> That still sounds like "not quite production ready for everyone" but
> Alpha hardly feels fair to Guix anymore.  (The most alpha thing about
> GuixSD thing at this point is the install process, and hey, it's like
> going oldschool with my install again.... :))
> 
> Or, when to switch?
>  - Chris
> 

On the other side, gnome-shell sounds like a good cut-off for beta.

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Re: Moving to beta? When?

[Pjotr Prins]

On Sun, Dec 20, 2015 at 10:08:26AM +0200, Efraim Flashner wrote:
> On the other side, gnome-shell sounds like a good cut-off for beta.

And beta should last months, not years.

PJ.

Re: Moving to beta? When?

[anonymiss]

> On Sun, 20 Dec 2015 10:08:26 +0200
> Efraim Flashner <efraim@flashner.co.il> wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 18 Dec 2015 19:40:29 -0600
> Christopher Allan Webber <cwebber@dustycloud.org> wrote:
> 
> > Hello all,
> > 
> > Guix is super stable for me these days.  In a sense, more stable
> > than any other system I've ever run.  We also are quickly moving to
> > the point where *most* core packages people need are there.
> > 
> > I think the Alpha label is too conservative.  Once gnome-shell
> > lands, or once the next release comes out, what do people think
> > about Beta?  
> 
> I was going to save it for a 0.10 vs 1.0 debate, but here makes sense
> also :) I think it also comes down to what are we missing? Not
> necessarily for beta, but more as a list between "here" and "1.0
> worthy."
> 
> gnome(-shell) and kde: I think many people would expect these

I know some people who would expect a working full disk encryption
with whatever they use, including myself.

> 
> installer: I haven't looked at the gentoo or archlinux installer
> recently, but ours looks similar in terms of "here's a shell, go
> ahead and bootstrap it." Also we have some lingering issues
> like /home on a different partition, actually partitioning and
> formatting the device, and maybe more.

I don't know about archlinux anymore, last time I tried it was even
more simplified then I remembered (partition, bootstrap, other stuff,
done), and Gentoo is also pretty forward (partly because the
documentation is very good and leaves no questions at all.

> 
> guix pull: super slow as-is :) going back to the gentoo comparison,
> iirc gentoo rsyncs the svn repo, and we all know how fast `git pull
> && make` is.
> 
> anything else?
> 
> > That still sounds like "not quite production ready for everyone" but
> > Alpha hardly feels fair to Guix anymore.  (The most alpha thing
> > about GuixSD thing at this point is the install process, and hey,
> > it's like going oldschool with my install again.... :))
> > 
> > Or, when to switch?
> >  - Chris
> >   
> 
> On the other side, gnome-shell sounds like a good cut-off for beta.
> 



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Re: Moving to beta? When?

[Taylan Ulrich Bayırlı/Kammer]

Efraim Flashner <efraim@flashner.co.il> writes:

> guix pull: super slow as-is :)

[embarrassed]

I'm free of work for the next two weeks, so hopefully I'll finally get
this patch done, health issues notwithstanding (I think they're waning
anyway).

'guix pull' should then take 3-5 minutes on a moderately modern machine
and average Internet connection, I think.  (On my Intel i5 with a 100
Mbps connection, it takes 2-3 minutes.)

Frankly, that's still a lot when compared to some other systems, but
hopefully good enough for the time being.

Taylan

Re: Moving to beta? When?

[Taylan Ulrich Bayırlı/Kammer]

taylanbayirli@gmail.com (Taylan Ulrich "Bayırlı/Kammer") writes:

> ... Internet connection speed ...

Hogwash.  I did all my tests with local tarballs so far, so the time of
cloning the repo wasn't included at all.  However, with --depth 1 it
seems to take mere seconds for me.  Faster than expected.

Taylan

Re: Moving to beta? When?

[Ludovic Courtès]

taylanbayirli@gmail.com (Taylan Ulrich "Bayırlı/Kammer") skribis:

> I'm free of work for the next two weeks, so hopefully I'll finally get
> this patch done, health issues notwithstanding (I think they're waning
> anyway).

I hope you’re getting better.

> 'guix pull' should then take 3-5 minutes on a moderately modern machine
> and average Internet connection, I think.  (On my Intel i5 with a 100
> Mbps connection, it takes 2-3 minutes.)
>
> Frankly, that's still a lot when compared to some other systems, but
> hopefully good enough for the time being.

I think there are two things here: speeding up compilation is the main
thing, and then we’ll also switch to Git instead of downloading a whole
snapshot every time.

Thanks,
Ludo’.

Re: Moving to beta? When?

[Fabian Harfert]

Am Fri, 18 Dec 2015 19:40:29 -0600
schrieb Christopher Allan Webber <cwebber@dustycloud.org>:

> Hello all,
> 
> Guix is super stable for me these days.  In a sense, more stable than
> any other system I've ever run.  We also are quickly moving to the
> point where *most* core packages people need are there.
> 
> I think the Alpha label is too conservative.  Once gnome-shell lands,
> or once the next release comes out, what do people think about Beta?
> 
> That still sounds like "not quite production ready for everyone" but
> Alpha hardly feels fair to Guix anymore.  (The most alpha thing about
> GuixSD thing at this point is the install process, and hey, it's like
> going oldschool with my install again.... :))
> 
> Or, when to switch?
>  - Chris
> 

I agree: Guix is not alpha software. It works perfect on my current
system and I don't need GNOME or KDE desktops. And I think guix
system init is enough as an installer. For me (I use GNU/Linux since
two years only) it was easy to follow the documentation, copy the
example config file, edit it and call 'guix init'. We just could provide
a script generating an input file for this and calling it at the end.
Apart from that there's no need to keep the alpha state for the next
release.

Re: Moving to beta? When?

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi!

I would say that GuixSD is more alphaish than Guix, but I’m fine calling
it “beta” as well (in fact, I took a step in that direction when I
updated the web site a couple of days ago for the fundraiser after we
had had a similar discussion on IRC; look at this blue note at the top
;-)).

The main blockers to 1.0 IMO are:

  • full-disk encryption in GuixSD (see in particular
    <http://bugs.gnu.org/21843>);

  • ‘guix pull’ made faster & more secure (how do we authenticate code?
    how do we know it’s the latest code?);

  • stable build farm infrastructure;

  • clean upgrade path, revocation, and delegation for the keys used to
    sign substitutes (currently we have no easy way to provide an
    updated key for hydra.gnu.org, or to revoke the existing one, for
    instance.)

Then of course there are many other improvements that can be made,
notably usability improvements, of which having a fully working GNOME
desktop or a nicer installer are one aspect.

I think these are highly desirable, but not blockers for 1.0, in the
sense that 1.0 should provide a stable implementation of the core
features, but not necessarily every feature one would hope for.

WDYT?

Ludo’.