Re: Good vibes, bad vibes

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Hi Simon,

On Tue, 27 Oct 2026 at 12:22, Ludovic Courtès <l...@gnu.org> 
wrote:

This growth problem is not entirely new: we wouldn’t have all 
of CRAN or
PyPI in Guix proper.  In the former case, it’s good that the 
separate
Guix-CRAN channel exists, and that Guix itself doesn’t aim to 
provide
all of the 30k packages or so of CRAN.  Yet, vibe coding gives 
the
problem a new dimension and could be the basis of a simple 
package
inclusion criterion.

About this, it reminds me some ideas [0,1] discussed months ago: 
moving
peripheral packages to channels (still maintained by Guix, but 
as
separate repositories).

Good candidates to be extracted seem the current Guix proper 
packages
from CRAN and/or Bioconductor, then humanly maintain them into 
one or
more dedicated channels – unrelated to the fully automated 
guix-cran and
guix-bioc channels.

CRAN and Bioconductor packages could certainly move.  Inclusion in 
Guix came first, the separate channels second.  Now I think it 
would be fine to move them all to the separate channel, as long as 
we keep a distinction between those that have been "audited" and 
those that are just automatically generated with no guarantees at 
all.

The big obstacle to even using the guix-cran and guix-bioc 
channels is that it makes Guix operations rather slow.

That said, R packages are very unusual in that there are very few 
other packages that depend on them.  Extracting other packages to 
separate channels is likely much more problematic.

--
Ricardo