Re: Introducing ‘guix pack’

[Andy Wingo <wingo@igalia.com>]

On Mon 20 Mar 2017 15:14, ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès) writes:

> Federico Beffa <beffa@ieee.org> skribis:
>
>> If you provide an archive such as
>> 'guile-2.2.0-pack-x86_64-linux-gnu.tar.lz' reachable from the main
>> project page (especially without any warning about its intended
>> purpose), I bet that many peoples will install it and keep it.  If more
>> projects follow this example, we land to the above scenario where "rm
>> -rf /gnu" is not practical at all.

Replying to Federico: These are the same considerations as with Guix
fwiw, unless you remove old profiles and "guix gc".

Another solution to this concern is to remove /gnu/store and re-unpack
the tarballs that you still want.

Generally though I think we shouldn't expect people to access the store
directly; they'd only use /opt/gnu or whatever.  In the case that you
have upgraded the software, surely the problem is fixed (though of
course you may fix the problem for pack A but not pack B).

The natural solution is to use a package manager of course, as you note
:)

> I agree, there’s always a risk.  I think what we can do is communicate
> about these risks, and avoid using distributing packs in situations that
> make it too likely that people will keep the pack without ever
> upgrading.

Agreed, though I wouldn't over-stress the risks to be honest -- Guix
gives both users and distributors the ability to generate a new pack
easily.  A user can decide not to upgrade even in a system that is
managed by Guix.  User freedom is all of this :)

Andy