build: guix package was removed from debian #33982

1. 
   laanwj commented at 11:58 am on December 1, 2025: member

   Apparently the guix debian package was no longer maintained, and was removed from debian recently (see https://lwn.net/Articles/1035491/). Ubuntu and other debian derivatives will likely follow.

   This means we need new setup instructions for guix on debian in contrib/guix/INSTALL.md.

2. laanwj added the label Docs on Dec 1, 2025
3. laanwj added the label Build system on Dec 1, 2025
4. 
   fanquake commented at 12:00 pm on December 1, 2025: member

   Related discussion in #33574.
5. 
   laanwj commented at 12:04 pm on December 1, 2025: member

   Thanks! Strange that i’ve not noticed before. This was the first time i ran into the issue.

   For most platforms we could refer to the binary installers in https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/guix/ .

   It’s mainly annoying on riscv64, because GUIX doesn’t ship their own binaries for that, and debian did.

6. 
   laanwj commented at 12:15 pm on December 1, 2025: member

   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.

   “Wait for 1.5.0” SGTM, too.

   If it isn’t re-added i think it makes sense to remove the mention of the package from the docs completely, as most people are bound to run the newest debian release. The wording of “various releases” is a bit vague, more people are likely going to run into this.

   So let’s keep this issue open until it’s resolved one way or another.

7. maflcko added this to the milestone 31.0 on Dec 1, 2025
8. 
   fanquake commented at 2:34 pm on January 14, 2026: member

   Guix 1.5.0rc1 is available for testing: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2025-12/msg00182.html.
9. 
   fanquake commented at 2:51 pm on January 22, 2026: member

   v1.5.0 has been tagged: https://codeberg.org/guix/guix/src/tag/v1.5.0.
10. 
    fanquake commented at 1:08 pm on January 23, 2026: member

    https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2026/gnu-guix-1.5.0-released/
11. 
    Sjors commented at 4:39 pm on January 26, 2026: member

    On my Ubuntu x86_64 machine I have a manual Guix installation. As root I pulled it from 20dbf225f332ccc707578263ed710dcf2a8fb78e (August 2024) to v1.5.0:

    0guix pull --commit=v1.5.0 --no-substitutes
    

    And then also on the regular guix user.

    Sanity checked with:

    0guix build --system=x86_64-linux  hello
    

    Would the next step be to bump our time machine commit to that tag or a more recent commit?

    I’ll update #32759 with my experience on Apple Silicon.

    Hopefully this will show up in various distros over time too.

12. 
    davidgumberg commented at 9:27 pm on January 29, 2026: contributor

    https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2026/gnu-guix-1.5.0-released/

    Nice! @laanwj Skimming the release notes:

    Release tarballs are now available for the RISC-V 64-bit architecture (riscv64-linux).

13. 
    hebasto commented at 10:43 pm on January 29, 2026: member

    https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2026/gnu-guix-1.5.0-released/

    Nice!

    @laanwj Skimming the release notes:

    Release tarballs are now available for the RISC-V 64-bit architecture (riscv64-linux).

    A modern Linux kernel is still necessary. The Elastic Metal RV1 running kernel 5.10 is a nightmare.

Contributors
laanwj fanquake Sjors davidgumberg hebasto

Labels
Docs Build system

Milestone
31.0