Re: Policy to remove obsolete packages

[ng0@n0.is]

Bjrn Hfling transcribed 846 bytes:
> On Mon, 04 Feb 2019 23:52:47 +0100
> Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> > (Note that, IIUC, in openSuSE a package can be broken and yet remain
> > installable by users, because the last binary that was produced is
> > still around.)
> 
> We have guix pull --commit=..., inferiors, channels and time-travel, so
> there are plenty opportunities to keep old states :-)

There are many ways to keep it, but they are really sometimes just jumping through too many hoops. 
Or depending on what your idea of keeping old packages is. it should be easy, but
it involves a good amount[1] of work to build a much older version
with the otherwise almost-only recent,updating,master.
To the point where you have to do the logical thing and look into
which versions upstream or guix build around that time as dependencies
and simply "freeze" all the dependencies in your package.

1: amount depending on what you are building

There are other ways to handle obsolete packages, but I think they
don't map to how guix works:

a year or 2 back i experimented with a complete resructure of Guix,
and packages got split up differently (one module per package mostly)
leading to different kinds of problems and fixes.
a separate repository with the prefix -wip holds all the unstable,
obsolete, unfinished, etc packagesi (remotely comparable to how
ports trees are handled, but not quiet like it[1]). That's the gist
of it. just have a repository instead of dropping it from a tree.
Once it's fixed up in the "wip" repository, move it back into the
main repository.
I can elaborate more on this if you want me to once I'm no longer sick.

> Björn
>