Re: doc: Removing much of Binary Installation (was: Feedback of the GNU Guix manual)

[Vagrant Cascadian <vagrant@debian.org>]

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On 2024-03-06, pelzflorian (Florian Pelz) wrote:
> I don’t feel qualified to judge, but is this the preference?  Arch wiki
> advises against the Arch AUR package: “Therefore, after updating Guix
> once, the AUR advantage really turns into a disadvantage, as there will
> be many unnecessary files in the /usr file tree that are part of the
> Guix AUR package but that are never used by Guix anymore.  Therefore,
> consider using the manual installation.” [0]
>
> The reason of existence for these distribution packages is probably
> similar to the reason why the Binary Installation section exists.

Indeed, after the first guix pull, most of the packaged files are no
longer used.

As the one who packaged and maintains guix in Debian, my main motivation
was and is to have a trust path from debian; mainly not having to
manually verify the signatures of the manual installation method (I
would hazard to guess that the percentage of people who actually do
manually verify signatures is disturbingly small).

The guix-daemon should continue to work from the packaged version,
although as guix develops more and more features; how long an old
version can be expected to continue to work remains an open question.

I cannot say I have done a *great* job at maintaining guix in Debian,
but hopefully at least a passable job. Although there are some annoying
things that probably need to be fixed:

  https://bugs.debian.org/1064748
  a.k.a.
  https://issues.guix.gnu.org/69518

... or backported to Debian stable:

  https://bugs.debian.org/1036304
  https://bugs.debian.org/1038916


I have found a fair number of issues (especially typos!) to fix in
upstream guix as a result of packaging it for Debian, so if nothing
else, it is some quality assurance! :)


live well,
  vagrant

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