Subject: Re: [bug#75751] Request for merging "python-team" branch

From: Andreas Enge <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 1 Apr 2025 23:15:34 +0200

Hello Nicolas,

Am Wed, Mar 26, 2025 at 02:03:26PM +0100 schrieb Nicolas Graves:
> The issue is that Python development is not as well structured as those
> of other languages.  I noticed for instance that almost all failing
> packages in bioinformatics and astronomy are packages that are simply
> not developped anymore.  We could remove them or maybe move them to
> guix-past, but the effort for making them build again is not bearable in
> Guix.  That still means we're going to remove at least 15 packages just
> because they don't build.

I also think we should more aggressively remove not building packages
from Guix; this is not particularly a Python issue, I also came across
several such packages by working on science team in the last few days.
Some packages are abandoned upstream for years and also have not been
built in Guix for years; we cannot substitute ourselves for upstream.
And anyway this indicates that probably nobody is using such Guix
packages in the first place.

See
   https://guix.gnu.org/manual/devel/en/html_node/Deprecation-Policy.html
for the procedure; essentially, file a bug and wait one month if
somebody objects (and then, ideally, comes up with a plan to rescue the
package).

I do not think that guix-past is a good place; as far as I remember, we
used it for packages so old as to never have been in Guix. Packages from
Guix are in principle still reachable through time-machine.

Andreas