Subject: bug#36659: There should be an unattended upgrades service

From: Matthew Brooks <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 2019 02:29:07 -0500

If an automatic updater is included by default (which I think would be a rather bad idea), it absolutely needs to be very easy for a user to disable.
GuixSD gives users a hell of a lot more control over the system and software and such than most other operating systems do, and that's a great strength. Leaving all those decisions in the hands of an automatic updating algorithm seems like a great way to discourage users from actually using the full power of the system and instead treat guix as just another generic distribution that decides things for the users instead of letting them decide for themselves. Especially since guix already lets the user know if it's older than about a week or so, which is probably plenty for anything other than the most demanding of security needs.
Further, an automatic upgrade service wouldn't really add anything useful, since cron jobs and scripts can already be used to automate upgrading if one so desires. Additionally, anyone who is able to install the system to begin with would easily be able to set up such a cron job if they wish, since creating the system config file takes more work than making a small bash script with the few commands needed to update everything.