June 8, 2022 at 9:38 PM, "Ludovic Courtès" <l...@gnu.org
mailto:l...@gnu.org?to=%22Ludovic%20Court%C3%A8s%22%20%3Cludo%40gnu.org%3E >
wrote:
> Guix is *potentially* even more up-to-date than NixOS thanks to
> ‘--with-latest’ and ‘--with-branch’! \o/
I do use --with-latest for testing package upgrades. But it is tedious to type
$ guix build X --with-latest=X
in order to test the latest package.
What would be nice is if
$ guix build --latest X
is an equivalent command. Certainly a shell script could take care of that:
guix-build-with-latest() {
guix build "$1" --with-latest="$1"
}
but having it done in guix itself would be convenient.
> Seriously though, we could take better advantage of the tooling that we
> have: ‘guix refresh’, ‘guix graph’, and the corresponding APIs. With
> that, we can write code that automatically tries out package updates and
> prepares patches, for instance. We could even largely automate “update
> trains” (what we’re doing with master/staging/core-updates).
It could be an option to guix refresh, for example
$ guix build --latest X --export-patch
would build X with the latest version and export a patch with an appropriate
commit message (like marking failed builds with DRAFT). This would help users
contribute without having to clone the git repo.
