Re: Roadmap for Guix 1.0

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Hi Chris,

> I'm not advocating that we change anything; I'm only advocating that we
> should make our stability promise (if any) clear by documenting it.  If
> you want to know my thoughts about what sort of stability promise we
> should provide, I'd be happy to talk about that also, but here I'm only
> saying that we should provide a promise.  The details of the promise are
> less important.
>
> If you agree, then perhaps we can proceed along the following lines:
>
> 1) Discuss what our stability promise should be.  It might be that we
>    decide to simply stick with the status quo and document it.  But
>    whatever the result, it should be something that hopefully everyone
>    agrees on (especially maintainers and contributors).
>
> 2) Document it.  Put it on the website, in the manual, etc.
>
> 3) Follow it.  Mention it in the Contributing section of the manual, the
>    README, etc., and require people to adhere to it when making changes.
>
> As a maintainer, what do you think?  Does it makes sense for the Guix
> project to set expectations by documenting our stability promise?

This is difficult.  The version jump signalizes that Guix is ready for
“productive” use; it really merely adjusts the version number in
accordance with how the community has been using Guix.

I’d be wary of putting something more than that in writing.  1.0 means
“this works pretty well” and “you shouldn’t expect sudden large changes
to how this works”.

I’d like to leave the discussion of a stability promise to a time when
we decide to maintain a “stable” branch.  The other kind of stability
applies only to using Guix as a library, which I don’t think is a very
popular use outside of Guix itself.

--
Ricardo