Re: Staging branch [substitute availability armhf-linux]

[Leo Famulari]

On Thu, Jan 14, 2021 at 09:44:17AM +0100, Mathieu Othacehe wrote:
> Your weather summary is a great idea, thanks! As I said in my previous
> email, the armhf substitutes are not built right now on the CI. It's
> really sad but we have to make an impossible choice between:

Specifically about armhf, if anybody wants to use it with Guix, I hope
they will speak up. I would have expected to hear from users that they
were not getting any substitutes.

I think we should monitor the volume of substitute requests per platform
and see how big the demand for armhf Guix really is.

Although there is a huge amount of armhf hardware deployed, Guix seems a
very poor fit for it. There is almost no armhf hardware that is suitable
for a build-from-source distro in terms of performance, thermal design
and suitable storage (SD cards will not last for unless you pay a huge
amount for the absolute highest quality). Binary distros like Trisquel
are a much better option for armhf.

All that is not a reason to not support armhf, but if nobody is using
it, then we should officially deprecate it, and not leave it in this
in-between state.