Andreas Enge <[email protected]> skribis: > On Tue, Oct 20, 2015 at 09:45:54PM +0200, Ludovic Courtès wrote: >> The Nixpkgs folks have a ‘staging’ branch for changes that cause mass >> rebuilds but are well tested, such that they can be merged into ‘master’ >> anytime². Perhaps something we should do as well? > > Would that be different from your suggestion that if the curl update caused > a rebuild of too many packages (whatever that would mean, which is a separate > discussion) it should not be done on core-updates, but on its own branch, > for instance, curl-update? One practical advantage I see in a staging > branch, if I understand your suggestion correctly, is that one would not need > to modify the set of jobs on hydra to now also build curl-update, and then > maybe giflib-update, and then xyz-update, but it would always be called > "staging".
Yes. > Now the "well tested" assumption is dubious. I actually do not know whether > the curl update will go through. I tried to build one of the packages shown > by "guix refresh -l curl" that looked simple (mpd), but it turned out it > was not simple at all and needed a lot of rebuilds (including texlive). > Admittedly, I could have spent more time searching a direct dependency, > probably by using one of your recent graph drawing commands. So in case > a problem turns up, would we revert a curl update on the staging branch > and do more local work before proposing it again? Ideally, we’d test as much as possible locally, or, for important library updates, in a dedicated branch. The TeX Live issue is orthogonal: We seriously need a ‘texlive-minimal’ variant, and the full-blown ‘texlive’ must not be depended on by any other package. > And if Efraim wished to do a gitlib update after my curl update, what would > be the protocol? Would he be expected to wait until the hydra build of the > curl update has finished? Or at least until it has finished on x86_64? > Otherwise, we would again face the risk of the staging branch becoming > an update-the-world branch with unforeseen ramifications. Yeah, for sure. I have to admit that we may be unable to do much better until we can finally change the hydra.gnu.org front-end, which is the main bottleneck here (at least for i686/x86_64.) Thanks, Ludo’.
