Re: On "next" packages and related confusions.

[Ryan Prior]

-------- Original Message --------
On 11/11/24 9:10 AM, Divya Ranjan <divya@subvertising.org> wrote:

>  Hello,
>  
>  As someone who’s been recently involved in packaging some software for GNU 
> Guix I’m confused with certain choices, mostly with the [package]-next 
> category. What should these next packages be?


As your intuition hints, "next" is arbitrary. It indicates somebody's judgement 
that it would be inappropriate to update the main package to that version, 
perhaps because of instability or perhaps because the update would require a 
lot of rebuilds.

I think it would be appropriate if each "next" package had a code comment, or 
perhaps an addendum to its package description, describing how it relates to 
the main packaged version.

In case you don't know about "--with-latest", that's the supported way to 
install the latest master branch of a package. "-next" packages are not meant 
to closely track master.