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Removing Guix from Debian

(lwn.net)
137 points 6581 | 7 comments | 02 Sep 25 14:49 UTC | HN request time: 0.434s | source | bottom
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Arcuru ◴[02 Sep 25 19:05 UTC] No.45107598[source]▶
> According to Debian's popularity contest (popcon) statistics, there are not quite 230 systems with Guix installed.
replies(2): >>45107878 #>>45109461 #
JohnFen ◴[02 Sep 25 19:27 UTC] No.45107878[source]▶
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.
replies(4): >>45107958 #>>45107996 #>>45108386 #>>45109506 #
cestith ◴[02 Sep 25 19:34 UTC] No.45107958[source]▶
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.
replies(1): >>45108011 #
1. yjftsjthsd-h ◴[02 Sep 25 19:38 UTC] No.45108011[source]▶
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.
replies(5): >>45108222 #>>45108271 #>>45108283 #>>45109442 #>>45115445 #
2. Ologn ◴[02 Sep 25 19:57 UTC] No.45108222[source]▶
It lists 118698 installs of firefox-esr.

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

replies(1): >>45115380 #
3. jsight ◴[02 Sep 25 20:00 UTC] No.45108271[source]▶
Firefox-esr seems to be much more common (~118k): https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=firefox-esr
4. ◴[02 Sep 25 20:01 UTC] No.45108283[source]▶
5. dspillett ◴[02 Sep 25 21:41 UTC] No.45109442[source]▶
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.

6. omniglottal ◴[03 Sep 25 13:16 UTC] No.45115380[source]▶
Yes, and these numbers have been established as what we in the industry call "invalid".
7. cestith ◴[03 Sep 25 13:21 UTC] No.45115445[source]▶
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.