Hello all, right now there is no uniformity on whether a teams uses -next for a unreleased, unstable version of packages (e.g., guile-next) or whether teams use the same package name for unreleased, unstable versions of packages (e.g., go). That is confusing for the user (well, at least I was confused).
When I asked about this, I was told there are no rules, so basically packager can do whatever. Before I start the GCD process to define those rules, I would like to "feel the room" and see whether the community considers this topic a debate-worthy (so that I do not waste the time writing the document and bothering people needlessly). Since we are a distribution, users should be able to have the same expectations across all our packages, and not having to inspect how each team does things, as long as they are just "using" Guix. So there should be clear expectation what `guix install PKG' will give you. Will it be a stable, released version? Will it be a latest release candidate? Will it be a git snapshot of a yet-to-be-release-candidate version? Therefore I think we should have a common naming pattern. So, the question is, do we want some rules for the naming and versioning of the packages (e.g., $pkg is any *released* version, and $pkg-next is *any* version, often newer, possibly git snapshot or a release candidate)? Or do you feel this would be governance overreach, it should stay strictly up to the packagers and we should just document that users who do not want release candidates should just always pin versions of everything? Thank you for your time, Tomas -- There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation, naming things and off-by-one errors.
