Hi Guix,

Following a discussion on irc on the weekend I was wondering how the 
deprecation policy will apply for packages with multiple variants and versions, 
especially because the reason the variant exists is mostly the number of 
rebuilds caused by changing the default package instead,


As an example 
https://codeberg.org/guix/guix/commit/641992f1ee4d47ed24070e8b6dc3e79d1fb180b0 
introduced 2 new versioned doxygen symbols and made doxygen an alias to the 
older version to prevent rebuilds.

How should this get resolved when doxygen gets updated in the future? The 
logical way is to also remove the obsolete doxygen packages breaking every 
downstream depending on the versioned symbols.

Similar looking through some other package variants some have a comment to 
merge with the original package "on the next rebuild cycle" (that got forgotten 
about).

The problem with this is that now that e.g a newer doygen is available no one 
has an incentive to try to update the default one anymore as the immediate 
problem is fixed and the default doxygen lives forgotten in the corner. 


Thanks,
Y.

  • Deprecation Polic... Development of GNU Guix and the GNU System distribution.

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