Removing Guix from Debian

> According to Debian's popularity contest (popcon) statistics, there are not quite 230 systems with Guix installed.

But most people using Debian turn popcon off. I don't at all doubt that Guix is not used by most people, but I'm quite certain the number of users is well above 230.

The locales package has over 265k installs in the same recent report that lists 231 copies of guix. That’s less than 0.09% or so.

For comparison, git has ~155,000 installs and the common base packages have ~266,000:

https://popcon.debian.org/index.html

By the same virtue, https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=firefox only lists 5749 installs of firefox. I'd take it with a grain of salt.

It lists 118698 installs of firefox-esr.

https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=firefox-esr

Firefox-esr seems to be much more common (~118k): https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=firefox-esr

Can't really complain if their usage stats aren't taken into account then, I'd say?

Or just to take the raw data with a grain of salt because some people care about privacy and haven't had time to read up on what the privacy policy is for example. That doesn't automatically mean these people stop being worth considering as legit users of the software

It's not a complaint, it's just a fact to consider.

That is still more than an order of magnitude higher (2.17% rather than 0.09%).

And FF ESR is the more common by far (44.5%) as it is the default, people only install the other FF package if they have specific need to be closer to the leading edge. The build environments for the two will be very close, at least compared to the oddities being reported in the Guix requirements, so the hassle of maintaining FF and FF-ESR compared to just one of them is not going to be comparatively large compared to maintaining packages for just one of the pair.

Perhaps, but there is a certain charm in a single individuals obsessive devotion to a problem nobody else sees. I like that the Linux ecosystem is weird.

You just have to assume that the install balance between those with it on is not massively different to the install balance between those who do not. This might not be the safest application of statistics, but it is the best available.

If more Guix users want to be seen and counted, to show how much of a need there might be to keep it despite the current issues, then there is a simple thing they can do… Or a less simple thing: the “without a community nor help” part seems rather significant to me in “But the Debian package maintainer has the almost impossible task to backport all the security fixes without a community nor help behind [maintaining it] and as things are going, this will probably lead to the Debian guix package being removed”.

FYI, privacy questions are here if you ever get the time: https://popcon.debian.org/FAQ

Yes, and these numbers have been established as what we in the industry call "invalid".

Besides the point already made about firefox-esr being the default package for Firefox, here are a couple of other points. First, that also means there are 5749 installations of non-default Firefox compared to 231 of guix.

Secondly, popcon works on servers and headless systems without X or Wayland. Those systems still use a package manager, and sometimes several. A graphical web browser like Firefox is unlikely to be installed without a GUI. I’ve seen plenty of systems with Snap, Flatpak, or Nix installed besides the OS-related apt, aptible, apt-get, rpm, yum, dnf, and language-related tools like pip, EasyInstall, rubygems, Bundler, cpanm, npm, cargo, OPAM, Composer, go get, or sbt with no GUI.