Re: [opinion] CVE-patching is not sufficient for package security patching

[Leo Famulari]

On Tue, Mar 16, 2021 at 07:19:59PM -0400, Mark H Weaver wrote:
> Ultimately, I gave up.  In my opinion, Guix has never achieved usability
> as a desktop system on non-Intel systems.  Therefore, the Guix community
> is unable to attract many developers who want a distro that supports
> non-Intel systems well.  Our community has thus become dominated by
> Intel users, and there's unsufficient political will to adopt policies
> that would enable us to provide a usable system for non-Intel users.
> 
> What do you think?

Thanks, as always, for your well-reasoned message. Your story of your
experience here, and what it means for Guix, computing security, and
free software in general, is really valuable. I still think it's really
unfortunate for the rest of us that you gave up, but I don't see how it
could have gone differently.

I agree with you that Guix moves too fast to support non-Intel
architectures in its current state. My hope is that, within the next two
years, there will be workstation aarch64 machines more widely available
at comparable prices to Intel/AMD, and this will translate into more
developer support for aarch64 in the years after that. Time will tell.