Re: A registry for distributed sources and binaries

[Leo Famulari]

On Sun, Jul 24, 2016 at 01:29:20AM -0400, Mark H Weaver wrote:
> Long ago, the Linux developers made a conscious decision to not support
> out-of-tree drivers, for much the same reasons.  Many times over the
> years, they have made changes to their internal APIs that required
> corresponding changes to a large number of drivers.  As a result, they
> have been able to keep their internal interfaces clean and free of
> backward-compatibility cruft.

If we did choose to present a stable API, we would need people to
maintain it.

There is so much "grunt work" required already. Upstream URLs are
changed, security bugs are disclosed, core package updates break a big
part of the package tree, etc. Most of this work requires little
knowledge, but lots of time and attention. Not to mention patch
review, which is hard work...

Not enough people are paying attention to this "boring stuff", in my
opinion.

On the other hand, there are many new packages and features, which is
*awesome*! But, if the boring stuff is ignored, the distro will fall
apart, and nobody would want to use this hypothetical API anyways.

By the way, I have a small set of private packages. I haven't needed to
adapt them to changes in GNU Guix so far. Breakage of external repos may
be rare enough that GNU Guix developers could ignore it entirely.