Surely if that's all they would just build with an explicit -std=whatever setting?

I recently custom-built Guile for my Arch system, and found that it won't build with GCC 15, but will with 14, which is the only other version in the Arch repository. I think that the Guile maintainers will need to get busy fixing the incompatibilities in question, before GCC 16 appears.

The locales package has over 265k installs in the same recent report that lists 231 copies of guix. That’s less than 0.09% or so.

Can't really complain if their usage stats aren't taken into account then, I'd say?

For comparison, git has ~155,000 installs and the common base packages have ~266,000:

https://popcon.debian.org/index.html

You just have to assume that the install balance between those with it on is not massively different to the install balance between those who do not. This might not be the safest application of statistics, but it is the best available.

If more Guix users want to be seen and counted, to show how much of a need there might be to keep it despite the current issues, then there is a simple thing they can do… Or a less simple thing: the “without a community nor help” part seems rather significant to me in “But the Debian package maintainer has the almost impossible task to backport all the security fixes without a community nor help behind [maintaining it] and as things are going, this will probably lead to the Debian guix package being removed”.

Not the GP, but: For Guix in general? That's easy to answer:

(1) Making things reproducible. That is one of the main reasons. And not only installed system packages. You can also use it to build reproducible projects you develop, if the dependencies are available on Guix.

(2) The other one is installing software, that your distribution doesn't have in standard repos.

If you install guix as a user, it augments or overrides the software available on your base system.

It helps a lot on Chromebooks, where it's not straightforward to get a recent release.

It also helps to get up-to-date packages if you're a regular user and your admin doesn't have them for some reason (maybe RHEL or Ubuntu LTS.)

Or even just if your admin doesn't have the packages installed.

It's not the slowness of releases, it's the fact they don't release any stable version with just security fixes. They only make new cumulative releases. Debian's model is to fix a version for their release and do security patches on that, not to push out the latest version.

What do you mean by "Just using Guix requires a pretty substantial amount of administrative work."

Like, as a user downloading packages, or a person packaging an application?

As a user downloading a package, it's been super easy for me and it's been years of running Guix with little to no issue (yet the benefits of rolling release, rollbacks, installing multiple versions of a given software etc.).

As for using it to package an application, I found the challenges mainly in the documentation. This was years ago and a lot of work has gone into improving the docs.

I'm curious what your experience has been.