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Nix has a stable channel (six-month release cadence, with one month of support overlap), which isn't LTS, and even just the stable channel is "expensive" enough

Nix has a stable channel (six-month release cadence, with one month of support overlap), which isn't LTS, and even just the stable channel is "expensive" enough to be difficult for the project to justify. Supporting LTS has a genuine non-trivial cost in engineering man-hours. Nix has the technological underpinnings to make it easier to support LTS, in theory, but in all likelihood there won't be an LTS channel without corporate sponsorship providing funding to employ LTS maintainers, akin to Red Hat / IBM, Canonical, SUSe, etc. Consider threads like https://discourse.nixos.org/t/what-should-stable-nixos-prioritize https://discourse.nixos.org/t/what-should-stable-nixos-prior...

geokon 5y ago
I guess what I don't get is, wouldn't an LTS be way way easier to maintain than a rolling, constantly breaking, release. Heck, id even prolly go through the effort of maintain my own software as a package if it's something I could do once every few years over a stable base. They could even make life easy and match version numbers with whatever the latest Ubuntu LTS is using. And people that'd need newer libs/bins could statically link whatever they need or provide whatever they want separately on top of that stable base (sorta like what PPAs do)
- otabdeveloper4 5y ago
  No. LTS is much more prone to breakage. LTS means you're porting yesterdays's security patches onto code that has been abandoned five years ago. And usually you have package maintainers doing this, not actual software developers. There's no reason to run LTS unless for corporate insanity purposes.
  - pxc 5y ago
    > And usually you have package maintainers doing this, not actual software developers. This is a weird thing to say. The package maintainers doing substantive backporting work for any distribution absolutely are actual developers. > There's no reason to run LTS unless for corporate insanity purposes. LTS releases also give you stability of behavior, which can be valuable even outside of corporate environments. Plus six months is really short. There's plenty of space between that and the full lifecycle length of a major RHEL release, or an Ubuntu LTS. NixOS releases that lasted two years would be awesome. I'd love to try to use a more long-term NixOS release for a downstream project, if it ever got the kind of corporate backing necessary to sustain that kind of release.
    - seoaeu 5y ago
      > The package maintainers doing substantive backporting work for any distribution absolutely are actual developers. The maintainers doing the backporting are affiliated with the distro rather than being developers of the software they're doing backports for. That is a big distinction because it determines who has to incur the costs of compensating them/recruiting them to volunteer
      - pxc 5y ago
        Oh! On this interpretation, the GP comment is basically missing an instance of the definite article there: > And usually you only have package maintainers doing this, not the actual developers. It's not super unusual for the maintainers of some program's packages in several distros to also be core developers of the project, but yeah, that's a good point.

geokon 5y ago

I guess what I don't get is, wouldn't an LTS be way way easier to maintain than a rolling, constantly breaking, release. Heck, id even prolly go through the effort of maintain my own software as a package if it's something I could do once every few years over a stable base. They could even make life easy and match version numbers with whatever the latest Ubuntu LTS is using. And people that'd need newer libs/bins could statically link whatever they need or provide whatever they want separately on top of that stable base (sorta like what PPAs do)

otabdeveloper4 5y ago
No. LTS is much more prone to breakage. LTS means you're porting yesterdays's security patches onto code that has been abandoned five years ago. And usually you have package maintainers doing this, not actual software developers. There's no reason to run LTS unless for corporate insanity purposes.
- pxc 5y ago
  > And usually you have package maintainers doing this, not actual software developers. This is a weird thing to say. The package maintainers doing substantive backporting work for any distribution absolutely are actual developers. > There's no reason to run LTS unless for corporate insanity purposes. LTS releases also give you stability of behavior, which can be valuable even outside of corporate environments. Plus six months is really short. There's plenty of space between that and the full lifecycle length of a major RHEL release, or an Ubuntu LTS. NixOS releases that lasted two years would be awesome. I'd love to try to use a more long-term NixOS release for a downstream project, if it ever got the kind of corporate backing necessary to sustain that kind of release.
  - seoaeu 5y ago
    > The package maintainers doing substantive backporting work for any distribution absolutely are actual developers. The maintainers doing the backporting are affiliated with the distro rather than being developers of the software they're doing backports for. That is a big distinction because it determines who has to incur the costs of compensating them/recruiting them to volunteer
    - pxc 5y ago
      Oh! On this interpretation, the GP comment is basically missing an instance of the definite article there: > And usually you only have package maintainers doing this, not the actual developers. It's not super unusual for the maintainers of some program's packages in several distros to also be core developers of the project, but yeah, that's a good point.