Re: On the quest for a new release model

[Attila Lendvai <attila@lendvai.name>]

> Our releases should mean something.

one thing i haven't seen mentioned:

AFAIU, not any version of guix can pull and build another guix version. i.e. when the guix command gets a new feature that is then used in the code that pulls and builds itself, then we have a bootstrap/staging problem not unlike with self-hosting compilers.

compilers usually use versioned releases to also mark the stages where stage n-1 is guaranteed to be able to build stage n.

i'm not sure how it is currently handled in guix. actually, i cannot come up with an example right now that requires bootstrapping, nor do i know how guix time-machine handles this. i assume everything around the pulling and building infrastructure is kept backwards compatible, so going back in time is not an issue.

but i do seem to remember a case where pulling from an old enough guix requires manual staging with `guix pull --commit=v1.2.3` to avoid pulling in too fresh commits that the current guix command wouldn't be able to build.

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• attila lendvai
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