Re: Planning for the next release

[ng0 <contact.ng0@cryptolab.net>]

Ludovic Courtès transcribed 3.0K bytes:
> Hello Guix!
> 
> It’s time to plan for the next release!  Here’s what we maintainers
> think should be done for the next release, which would hopefully happen
> within less than a month:
> 
>    1. ‘core-updates’ merged.  We’re almost there!
> 
>    2. ‘wip-installer’ retested, and probably merged.
> 
>       I think the prerequisite for it would be to do some more testing.
>       Last time people reported glitches here and there but John has
>       done quite a bit of work since then.  John: what about doing
>       another round of tests?
> 
>       In the installation image, we should probably make the installer
>       optional and mark it as “beta” or something like that.  That will
>       leave us time to iron out remaining issues, and will avoid having
>       people expect a rock-solid Debian-style installer.
> 
>       As far as review is concerned, we can probably do a quick and
>       lightweight review process since that’s quite a big chunk of code
>       and we don’t want the branch to block indefinitely.  So we can do
>       that quick process, and then incrementally improve it if needed.
>       I think it’s a reasonable approach given that the installer is
>       mostly an independent component.
> 
>       John, everyone: thoughts?
> 
>    3. UEFI support documented and possibly improved.
> 
>       We can certainly document the UEFI setup and add the /boot/efi
>       partition in some of the ‘operating-system’ examples.
> 
>       The more difficult part is the installation: do we need to make a
>       second, UEFI-specific, installation image?  When I installed
>       GuixSD on UEFI, I booted our installation image as “legacy”, but
>       then GRUB would default to a legacy install, not a UEFI install:
> 
>         https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2016-12/msg00799.html
> 
>       I’m not sure exactly what needs to be done.  Thoughts?
> 
>    4. Fix low-hanging fruits at <https://bugs.gnu.org/guix>; your help
>       welcome!
> 
> Please share your thoughts!
> 
> Ludo’.

Questions about UEFI are getting more frequent, so I'd say this is good
to document it properly.

On my side, people will and have asked for the intermediate time how/if
the http_proxy of Guix works. If someone has been using it with an
SOCKS5 proxy successfully, I'd would like to have this added to
documentation as well. My own experiment ended up with a shot in the
foot where I had to roll back because Guix was now unable to do anything
at all.

Maybe as a 'food for thought': More filesystems.. I have an work in
progress patch for XFS, but it's not completely clear how filesystems
are supposed to be built. All static? All dynamic? Both?