Re: On the quest for a new release model

[Attila Lendvai]

> 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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