Subject: [bug#76407] [GCD] A better name for the default branch

From: Simon Tournier <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 07 Mar 2025 16:39:30 +0100

Hi,

On Sun, 23 Feb 2025 at 15:42, Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]> wrote:

> Consider this scenario: I have a machine that I upgrade once every two
> months.  By the time the switchover is done, my machine still has
> ‘master’ in its ‘%default-guix-channel’ in its Guix.  Thus, when I run
> ‘guix pull’, I’ll end up pulling ‘master’, which (the GCD does not
> clarify this) will either fail because the branch has been removed
> altogether, or will give me an old snapshot.

After the end of the grace period, I propose to introduce a commit, thus
to have master as a fork of main, and such commit would teach
’update-cached-checkout’ to automatically switch.

The only question is about dealing with authentication; well it requires
a special care.  But it appears to me doable since both master and main
would be authenticated.

> Thus, I think the GCD should propose to keep updating the ‘master’
> branch as a mirror of ‘main’ for, say, a year (a cron job can take care
> of that).

Even one year isn’t enough. ;-)  I’m not sure to run “guix pull” once a
year as root.  And many irregular users will have an old snapshot.

Just to me mention that new issues are still reported about v1.2.0
released…  Sorry I’m too old to remember such ancient time. ;-)

Cheers,
simon