Greg Hogan <[email protected]> writes: > On Sat, Mar 14, 2026 at 10:54 AM Sergio Pastor Pérez > <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> Hello Andreas, >> >> Andreas Enge <[email protected]> writes: >> >> > Hello all, >> > >> > I use this opportunity to celebrate that all the QA efforts are paying off: >> > Currently we have 99.1% package availability on x86_64! >> > https://qa.guix.gnu.org/branch/master >> > >> > This is the highest value I have ever seen, and it makes the 100% look >> > reachable. Well, it also means about 300 broken packages, so there is >> > still work. And I wonder if buildability up to the last package is >> > reachable at all, given that with fast paced changes, something will >> > always break afresh, and we also have non-deterministic failures that >> > are particularly difficult to tackle. >> >> To tackle the stability problem, specially on the user side, I was >> thinking that we could rely on the git tagging mechanism. My proposal is >> to introduce a bot that will tag stable commits. So when the CI crosses >> certain substitute availability (could be a subset of packages deemed >> important for desktops) the bot will tag the commit on master. Then we >> will add some flag to guix pull to only jump between tagged commits. >> >> This has the advantage: >> >> - Security: Keeping the signature of commits therefore being transparent >> for the authentication mechanism. >> >> - Linear history: Not requiring any change on the commit history or >> workflow of the committers. >> >> - Stability: Pull only moves within stable versions. > > 100% is a project goal but unnecessary for a user profile, for which > we want to know the latest commit(s) with buildable substitutes > considering only that manifest.
Sometimes you are not sure of the packages you will need on the future, you may be starting a new project or learning some new discipline and you need to install new software. As users, we want a stable system for our current packages but also for future packages we may install. Most people don't necessarily need a rolling release. The good thing is that Guix can cater both! :) Best regards, Sergio
