[Nix-dev] Maintainership

Petr Rockai me at mornfall.net
Wed Jan 29 13:06:51 CET 2014


Thomas Bereknyei <tomberek at gmail.com> writes:
> That almost sounds like an "unstable" channel.

Unstable and unmaintained are two very different things.

>     Rather than removing unmaintained packages, can we make them available as a
>     separate, opt-in channel?

I'd say that is an option, but if the unmaintained pile contains
important software and basically everybody needs to enable it, we are
not much better off -- we'll still get a lot of breakage every time we
update the system and even up-to-date systems will likely sport many
vulnerabilities. Not everyone is happy to rely on security by obscurity
of NixOS, and if it becomes more widespread it could become an easy
attack target.

I imagine that non-NixOS installations of nixpkgs have a different set
of trade-offs though.

-- 
id' Ash = Ash; id' Dust = Dust; id' _ = undefined


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