doc: update Guix INSTALL.md

fanquake commented at 3:05 pm on October 8, 2025: member

It’s somewhat annoying that Guix is falling out of being packaged by distros. For some more context, see https://lwn.net/Articles/1035491/.

However, it is likely that the Guix package manager will soon be removed from the repositories for Debian 13 and Debian 12 (“bookworm”, also called oldstable).

This seems to be happening. You can’t apt install guix using the current release of Debian. https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=guix. Guix is not going to be included in next release of Ubuntu (25.10): https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=guix.

Looking at https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/guix, comments over the last few months seem to indicate that the build is broken.

A 1.5.0 release is planned for sometime in January 2026: https://codeberg.org/guix/release-planning/wiki/release-1.5.0-project/. So hopefully the situation is going to improve in future.

DrahtBot commented at 3:05 pm on October 8, 2025: contributor

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janb84 commented at 3:38 pm on October 8, 2025: contributor

Is there a reason (you know) why the project does not mention / recommend to install guix by using the shell installer as mentioned in the install doc of guix? Wouldn’t that be the answer to this problem? (Although not ideal)

fanquake commented at 3:40 pm on October 8, 2025: member

Is there a reason (you know) why the project does not mention / recommend to install guix by using the shell installer

We do: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/contrib/guix/INSTALL.md#options-1-and-2-using-the-official-shell-installer-script-or-binary-tarball.

m3dwards commented at 4:02 pm on October 8, 2025: contributor

From reading the blog post it seems that the main issue is around how Guix chooses to manage releases making it hard for distro package maintainers to release backports. With a small userbase the effort doesn’t seem worth it for them.

So perhaps the instructions should just focus on installing the guix binary from upstream. @fanquake is the concerning part for you that this might be a bad indicator for the guix project overall?

glozow added the label Docs on Oct 8, 2025

trevarj commented at 8:28 pm on October 9, 2025: none

While using Guix’s install.sh is my preferred method of installation on a “foreign distro”, I will acknowledge that it isn’t always a smooth experience. For example, when a user isn’t using bash as their shell and doesn’t know how Guix works they could miss the necessary env vars.

A crazy idea could be to offer a .deb package that is created using guix pack -f deb -m manifest.scm, where the manifest contains guix itself and the packages within contrib/guix/manifest.scm. Users on dpkg distros (Debian, Ubuntu, etc) can have a one-click install solution. Other formats, like rpm, are supported as well. This could be put through the trust chain like how releases are and verified by users. Didn’t test this yet, but just brainstorming.

this might be a bad indicator for the guix project overall? @m3dwards it is sad that Guix doesn’t receive as much attention and financial support as Nix, but they are working towards making changes to attract and retain users. From my understanding, the main point of Guix in the build process is that it’s bootstrappable

maflcko commented at 6:22 am on October 10, 2025: member

that this might be a bad indicator for the guix project overall?

The LWN article concludes that “Regular releases” are planned, so it is likely that the situation will improve and possibly make backporting bugfixes easier in the future. So in theory, the guix package could make its way back into Debian/Ubuntu.

fanquake commented at 7:58 am on October 24, 2025: member

Looks like a 1.5.0 release might happen in January, according to https://codeberg.org/guix/release-planning/wiki/release-1.5.0-project.

doc: update Guix INSTALL.md b4d0288c46

fanquake force-pushed on Oct 30, 2025

fanquake renamed this:
~~[WIP] doc: update Guix install instructions~~
doc: update Guix INSTALL.md
on Oct 30, 2025

fanquake marked this as ready for review on Oct 30, 2025

fanquake commented at 3:51 pm on October 30, 2025: member

Updated the PR description, and added 1.5.0 release. Marked this as reviewable, as I think its fine drop the expectations section from 2021.

doc: update Guix INSTALL.md #33574

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