On Sun, Jul 24, 2016 at 01:29:20AM -0400, Mark H Weaver wrote: > Long ago, the Linux developers made a conscious decision to not support > out-of-tree drivers, for much the same reasons. Many times over the > years, they have made changes to their internal APIs that required > corresponding changes to a large number of drivers. As a result, they > have been able to keep their internal interfaces clean and free of > backward-compatibility cruft.
If we did choose to present a stable API, we would need people to maintain it. There is so much "grunt work" required already. Upstream URLs are changed, security bugs are disclosed, core package updates break a big part of the package tree, etc. Most of this work requires little knowledge, but lots of time and attention. Not to mention patch review, which is hard work... Not enough people are paying attention to this "boring stuff", in my opinion. On the other hand, there are many new packages and features, which is *awesome*! But, if the boring stuff is ignored, the distro will fall apart, and nobody would want to use this hypothetical API anyways. By the way, I have a small set of private packages. I haven't needed to adapt them to changes in GNU Guix so far. Breakage of external repos may be rare enough that GNU Guix developers could ignore it entirely.
