Dealing with mass rebuilds

[Ludovic Courtès]

Mark H Weaver <address@hidden> skribis:

> Andreas Enge <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> andreas pushed a commit to branch master
>> in repository guix.
>>
>> commit 075c3ebd2dc3d8223e23025ceb5026810dfaa98d
>> Author: Andreas Enge <address@hidden>
>> Date:   Sun Oct 18 12:20:02 2015 +0200
>>
>>     gnu: curl: Update to 7.45.0.
>
> To avoid unnecessary rebuilds on hydra, I reverted this commit on
> master, and instead pushed it to the 'dbus-update' branch, which will
> hopefully be merged soon.

We’re talking of ~150 dependent packages, which to me sounded OK¹.

If we delay obvious changes like this too much, the risk is to end up
with upgrade-everything branches that take ages to get merged (what is
happening with ‘dbus-update’.)

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?

Ludo’.

¹ https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2015-10/msg00653.html
² http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.distributions.nixos/13447