[Nix-dev] Why having releases if you break things in it often

[Freddy Rietdijk]

Hi Stefan,

Regarding flexget. There were some security issues with an (indirect)
dependency, html5lib, and thus html5lib was upgraded. Maybe that broke
flexget, I don't know.

The main issue is just a lack of maintainers. It's relatively
straightforward to add a package to Nixpkgs, but maintaining a package set
this size that also keeps growing is becoming increasingly harder.

Freddy

On Mon, Jan 23, 2017 at 10:07 AM, Stefan Huchler <stefan.huchler at mail.de>
wrote:

> So because I dont need always newest versions on all of my boxes, I
> selected the 16.xx chhannel.
>
> There are here and there some minor issues as example kodi here and
> there crashes maybe 1-3 times a week. Could be extentions or something.
>
> For that and other reasons I update here and there all few weeks maybe
> the maschine.
>
> So one advantage of course is that if I notice that something does not
> work I can boot a old configuration, so I dont have to deal with some
> updates that broke stuff or rollback.
>
> But I wonder how you can break relativly often stuff (at the moment
> there seems to be a python dependency problem with flexget, that makes
> the daemon crash), in a "stable" release channel.
>
> I mean if I use debian, and stick to my "channel"/release, normaly
> nothing breaks, as long as I use only their package installer, pip
> updates of course broke stuff. If I use fedora, well I get maybe some
> upstream changes like new kernel versions, but normaly they brake also
> nothing.
>
> So if "stable" channel makes updates that are not needed (the older
> version of flexget works fine), whats the point or the criterias of
> those releases? I could then just use the newest version, if I have to
> relay on rollback / boot old versions anyway, I dont really see the
> point of "stable" channels.
>
> I had pretty good experiences with using the rolling channel, but had
> many times break stuff in the stable channel.
>
> Also the tools around generations / boot-generations is very confusing,
> why do I have 3 4 options in the nix-env --list-generation overview but
> 20 in the boot menu.
>
> But thats a 2nd different issue I guess.
>
> Just wonder what your policies are.
>
> Other stuff that broke on me in the past, was latex packages as example.
>
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