Am Thu, Mar 19, 2026 at 09:41:58AM +0000 schrieb Steve George: > > process: Anybody can propose to remove anything that still builds, but > > the removal does not take place unless consensus is reached. > (...) > I don't understand this point. I couldn't find any text about what happens if > there is a dispute about a removal? > If it's not there we should have clarity over handling disagreements since > the "consensus" word merely means "we should all agree". It's also has an > assumed, implicit meaning. We don't need a long definition, it could simply > stated that a disagreement between committers/team members is escalated to > the Maintainers, that would be explicit and clear.
I would say that this is solved by an "if" clause without an "else": If there is consensus, then a PR is prepared and the package will be removed; if not the process stops and we keep the package. Well, for a broken package, this implies that someone repairs it (the part in consensus where it says that people disagreeing should make a reasonable effort to solve the situation). For still building packages, it means we keep it. > I tried to quickly check this morning what other Distros do, to see how much > work we should be doing. > From what I can tell the regular release distributions (e.g. Debian, Ubuntu) > don't notify ahead of a release that a package is being removed. During the > upgrade, the package manager informs the user that packages will be removed, > and users can select to resolve it themselves. The difference between us and other distros is that in Guix, a mere reference to a removed package breaks "guix pull". The silliest case I remember is that some external channel imported a package that was then not even used inside the channel, but when I removed it from Guix, that broke "guix pull". So we need to inform channel maintainers, since otherwise users get what they perceive as random and unactionable error messages along "failed to compute the derivation for Guix". Andreas
