End of beta soon? drop i686?

[swedebugia@riseup.net]

Hi

First of all thanks for building a great OS! (im writing this in vimb in
guixsd) :D

Below is my reaction to the talk about 1.0 that has appeared on the
list.

I see Ludo' is entuthiastic about 1.0 and hope to reach that soon.

I recently decided to try running guix as a daily system to test and
hunt bugs and have fun.

In my view we still have a system where encountering a bug is still far
more common than any other OS I ever used.

Some of these bugs of course stems from the user not knowing how guix
works, but in my case I had to manage and work-around to just keep going
and getting things done.

For that reason I think we are still quite far from 1.0 at the moment.

That could of course change quickly, but I see more energy going into
updating (a tad rushed if you ask me) and packaging and this introduces
new instabilities and bugs a little faster than we can keep up it seems.

E.g. on 0.16.0-3.6ddc63e (a few days behind master) on an i686-install
on a x86 64 bit machine with a slow disk and 2GB RAM
1) right now webkit freezes on youtube

2) reconfigure is broken, see resent thread
$ sudo -E ~/src/guix/pre-inst-env guix system reconfigure ~/config.scm 
Password: 
guile: warning: failed to install locale
Backtrace:
In ice-9/boot-9.scm:
  2726:13 19 (_)
In ice-9/threads.scm:
    390:8 18 (_ _)
In ice-9/boot-9.scm:
  2994:20 17 (_)
   2312:4 16 (save-module-excursion #<procedure 9e63af8 at ice-9/boo?>)
  3014:26 15 (_)
In unknown file:
          14 (primitive-load-path "gcrypt/hash" #<procedure 9f4e260 ?>)
In gcrypt/hash.scm:
     19:0 13 (_)
In ice-9/boot-9.scm:
   2874:4 12 (define-module* _ #:filename _ #:pure _ #:version _ # _ ?)
  2887:24 11 (_)
   222:17 10 (map1 (((gcrypt common)) ((gcrypt utils)) ((rnrs #)) # ?))
  2800:17  9 (resolve-interface (gcrypt common) #:select _ #:hide _ # ?)
In ice-9/threads.scm:
    390:8  8 (_ _)
In ice-9/boot-9.scm:
  2726:13  7 (_)
In ice-9/threads.scm:
    390:8  6 (_ _)
In ice-9/boot-9.scm:
  2994:20  5 (_)
   2312:4  4 (save-module-excursion #<procedure 9e63a98 at ice-9/boo?>)
  3014:26  3 (_)
In unknown file:
           2 (primitive-load-path "gcrypt/common" #<procedure 9f9fe3?>)
In gcrypt/common.scm:
    35:13  1 (_)
In unknown file:
           0 (dynamic-link "/gnu/store/7y93yw3110fimzyrqlda7s7633ijk?")

ERROR: In procedure dynamic-link:
In procedure dynamic-link: file:
"/gnu/store/7y93yw3110fimzyrqlda7s7633ijkxcq-libgcrypt-1.8.3/lib/libgcrypt",
message: "file not found"


3) icecat does not have a substitute available and guix package -i
icecat -n outputs:
The following derivations would be built:
   /gnu/store/7wmg5qw3s45mi8ss9q3q45hfmx3j91y6-profile.drv
   /gnu/store/sfpiyr8mksl13g1kycigfi7yddf9pyi1-info-dir.drv
   /gnu/store/rm2hf8k5iawdqwi4ngjkndnws47cwnb7-glib-schemas.drv
   /gnu/store/rc6v87y5afpn5lcxn1fpm8dhzh9psgkj-xdg-desktop-database.drv
   /gnu/store/r5zvxiwbglk3z0vv1vxpr00fz0j0bavp-ca-certificate-bundle.drv
   /gnu/store/hxldf31yk8v0kx2vrmdxhca0vqmgd36h-xdg-mime-database.drv
   /gnu/store/kc1g4aiizjd83cmfnr29qk36znkb971f-rust-1.19.0.drv
   /gnu/store/4fc6d5aw42gpypq42svdn2l00lidw8r5-rust-1.20.0.drv
   /gnu/store/bzgwrd3dyw6kxq6lkrqfdh13xfl5gq2q-rust-1.21.0.drv
   /gnu/store/2s3y8vpvcc2rplsf8k3m787ildyd01xi-rust-1.22.1.drv
   /gnu/store/gww3qar4hrab1r6cnyafpk8wg44znzb9-rust-1.23.0.drv
   /gnu/store/aq8fy5fhr5rx3na83ziv48aqy4dbbf1w-rust-1.24.1.drv
   /gnu/store/70p9k9zd680lmwxqa03whpwq6xwywr1i-fonts-dir.drv
   /gnu/store/65hdbc7gzlxk1fwn658y6rjqb9k1dbh4-gtk-im-modules.drv
   /gnu/store/3lwwhgh4sijdb7bf7lkhnb777xxvax4v-gtk-icon-themes.drv
   /gnu/store/bxz8fxgmm1cgclkz5540nxibp0n3b5c9-icecat-60.3.0-gnu1.drv
   /gnu/store/s7kskm9w8fr0fr5b7m2rlap843cmqh8s-manual-database.drv

Having heard how a horror and RAM hog rust is I simply cannot use the
web on this guix version and would have to downgrade. The problem with
downgrading is lack of information. Building guix takes time and I dont
know which latest version of guix has an icecat x86 64-bit binary.

4) gnome-shell-extensions does not work with any of the browsers
available it seems.

5) our bug tracker is hard to navigate (for newcomers at least).
(surprisingly we do not seem to have a lot of duplicate bugs though)

Earlier running 0.15 and later on a x86 64 bit install I had far better
coverage of substitutes and fewer errors (before latest core-updates
merge).

To sum it up: lets not ruin what we have by rushing ahead and ending
beta too early.

Lets either drop i686 support or test it more and look into the missing
substitutes. 

I'm in favor of dropping i686 and let somebody else create a guix-32-bit
fork like what happened in Arc. Then we can focus on bughunting 64 bit
and working with the more promising architectures like those I mentioned
lately on devel instead of wasting time on slow legacy intel-backdoored
architecture.

-- 
Cheers
Swedebugia