bug#25852: Users not updating their installations of Guix

[Ludovic Courtès]

Leo Famulari <address@hidden> skribis:

> In my opinion, the recent bug #25775 (Can't install packages after guix
> pull) [0] exposed a sort of meta-bug: there are a significant number of
> users who were still using the guix-daemon from 0.10.0.
>
> It seems unlikely that they have been updating all of root's
> packages except for the guix package. Rather, I bet they never updated
> root's packages at all, for ~1 year.
>
> I think this is a serious documentation bug.

I’m not sure documentation would help.

Software like Firefox handles that by calling home to know its latest
version, but I’m not sure we want to have that happen automatically.

Thoughts on how we could address this?

Following discussions at the R-B summit, I considered adding a ‘guix
health’ (or similar) command that would report things like vulnerable
software in the profile.  Such a command could also suggest Guix
updates.

Thanks,
Ludo’.