[Nix-dev] Stable NixOS releases

[Eelco Dolstra]

Hi,

On 14/05/13 15:18, Alessio Igor Bogani wrote:

> On 14/05/2013 13:26, Eelco Dolstra wrote:
>> I would like to propose making periodic stable releases of NixOS.  Currently we
> [...]
> 
> Personally I would be very happy to have a stable NixOS system but I
> wouldn't want to quit from the rolling-release approach.

The master branch isn't going away, so you can still live on the edge :-)

>> Therefore it would be good to have stable releases that get bug fixes for a
>> certain amount of time.  For instance, we could make a stable release every 3
>> months or so, named (Ubuntu-style) <year>.<month>, e.g. 13.06, 13.09, and so on.
> 
> Will we be able to provide support and bug-fixes on a software which is
> available in a supported NixOS release when its own maintainer puts it
> in EOL? The maintenance in this situation requires back-porting which is
> a very hard and boring work...

This would be an issue if the lifetime of release were very long.  But I'm not
suggesting doing long-term (as in multiple years) releases now.

> For this reason I suggest an alternative and more simple approach which
> provides two channels: stable and unstable.

It would probably make be nice to have a stable channel that aliases the latest
current release branch.  However, the problem with such a channel is that it can
still give you big, unexpected changes if you run "nixos-rebuild --upgrade":
namely, every time a release comes out.

-- 
Eelco Dolstra | LogicBlox, Inc. | http://nixos.org/~eelco/