Re: *** TRYING TO INSTALL GUIXSD v0.15.0 FOR DAYS ***

[George Clemmer]

Hello swedebugia,

swedebugia <address@hidden> writes:

> Hi
>
> On 2018-11-01 01:09, George Clemmer wrote:
> snip
>> And, with the current state of the guix infrastructure, even a 'guix
>> pull' on a fresh vm-image triggers guile bootstrap. And a guile
>> bootstrap, on the best of days, displays these symptoms: howling CPUs
>> and hardly any disk activity.
>>
>> So, relative to what one expects when installing a distro this feels
>> hung. Not the most confidence inspiring experience to subject a guix
>> noob to ;-)
>>
> I react a little on the wording of you last phrase.
> We did not subject anyone to anything.

I am sorry this came across as a potshot. That was not my intent.

> Trying out beta software like guix (especially when our servers are
> down) and pulling the latest guix commit is in my view (with my
> earlier guix-experience) asking for trouble.
>
> Pulling a commit like the one that points to 0.15 see
> http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/tag/?h=v0.15.0 is far better
> -
> I did that 2 days ago with no trouble. No building locally of the few
> packages I needed on a bare-bone install, berlin had 30-40% of the
> substitutes available.
>
> We do a rolling release with NO testing branch currently. So everybody
> who pulls the latest and greatest is a tester willingly or not.

Yes I know, I have used GuixSD as my daily driver for nearly 3 years ;-)

Please let me restate the key points in hopefully more neutral terms:

The fact that Guix can build anything from source means that a new user
may think the Guix install is hung when it is, in fact, working as
designed.  This may cause failure to recruit new users.

Commentary:

It is not typical of a key product feature that when it works it feels
broken ;-). IMO this presents unique documentation, marketing, and
support issues that will need to be addressed to grow GuixSD beyond the
current user base.

> Thus what we could do to improve the situation is to instruct users to
> NOT pull the latest guix unless they know what they are doing or are
> willing to deal with anything that comes up...

Do you mean we should tell users specific commits to pull? Or 'guix
pull' should not pull from the latest commit?  Or something else?

Best,
- George

PS: Maybe further discussion should be taken off the bug?

PPS: Mark pointed out elsewhere that I may misunderstand Brian's
problem. IMO that doesn't undermine the points above.