Re: ‘core-updates’ schedule

[Leo Famulari]

On Thu, Apr 06, 2017 at 10:34:29AM +0200, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> This ‘core-updates’ cycle was terribly long, so I suggest to write down
> a schedule and then try hard to stick to it.  ;-)

At the beginning of the cycle, I was confident that we could build and
merge it in 2 or 3 weeks. But, it took about 6 weeks before we could
merge.

Something we can all do to speed up the process is try `guix package -u`
and `guix system build`, starting at the beginning of the freeze. [0]

You will find build failures before they show up on Hydra, and find bugs
and regressions before we merge core-updates into master. Our build farm
is relatively slow and unreliable, so it's inefficient to wait for it to
find build failures; it won't find applications bugs at all in many
cases.

> Last but not least: who wants to be the timekeeper?  The position mostly
> consists in firmly reminding people of the schedule.  :-)

I tried to do it this time around, but we kept finding bugs and
experiencing build failures that we couldn't ignore.

[0] I was able to rely on core-updates after ~3 weeks (excluding
libreoffice).