On 12/09/2013 11:56 PM, Mathijs Kwik wrote:
I would like to give my opinion on the current "flow" we seem to have and would like to hear your opinions. [...]
I think it's generally agreeable that rebuilds themselves aren't a reason to keep stuff long out of master, especially now that we have the stable branch(es) (cf. discussion https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/1317). AFAIK just rebuilds were never a reason to keep stuff for longer than around a week (Hydra finishing). The problem is that typically some things get broken, apart from some others being fixed. These don't even need to be build breaks but some subtler problems (like currently NetworkManager not connecting to encrypted networks in master), and it's not clear if it's mostly better with the change or without it (until some things get fixed).
[general workflow]This may be just my personal opinion, but I would prefer not too much of hack/break/fix-style on master. Sure, most of commits isn't likely to break more than to fix and it should go immediately to master (e.g. after plain build-test of the package itself).
Sure, I do prefer as short iterations as possible, but if it seems a change breaks more than fixes and people don't have time for it, then we get the long-term branch and it just can't be helped (well, it could be just reverted). I think the key here should be to have *separate* feature branches, so the other changes don't get dragged with it (like on the current stdenv-updates).
[current branches]AFAIK the only really-long-running branch with many changes is stdenv-updates. It's about 9 months now, it has been a great mess at times; I don't know the current breakage status currently, but I think it's close to being mergeable (although last time I checked there was even binutils with references to bootstrap-utils).
x-updates: (as I'm committing most of x-updates nowadays,) currently it lives about two months (note that e.g. llvm-3.3 is even in release from its start). Why separate: major X-server update, etc. were potentially dangerous, and it did cause a few build problems (which I didn't have time to fix immediately); being separate allowed me to *find* build breakages without breaking master.
Now the only potential reason for not merging x-updates to master is a [mesa-9.2.* bug], where I don't have a clue about its impact; I suppose we can risk it, as it's e.g. in Arch and Ubuntu Saucy.
[mesa-9.2.* bug] https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=67672 Vlada
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