Re: developing for guix with git

[Efraim Flashner]

On Thu, 28 Jan 2016 12:31:09 +0100
Ni* Gillmann <address@hidden> wrote:

> Following yesterdays "bug" I have a question which is only partly Guix
> related and more development/git style related.
> 
> I am used to develop on things which I do not have to build and they
> usually just work. Branching was never an issue.
> However with guix it started to become one apparently, as I can build
> the guix sourcetree from git clone with the master checkout but not
> while being on the local branch I created to work on lispf4, which does
> track the master.
> 
> I know it used to work, but this is strange for me. What are some ways,
> other than directly working on master and rebasing often, people here do
> interact with git while working on guix? In other words, how do you
> locally handle guix development?

I know you asked for ideas that didn't involve working against master and
rebasing, but that's really pretty much what I do. I find something that I
want to package or update and work on it. If it's good, then I run `git
checkout -b $branch_name` and send the patches off to the mailing list. If it
doesn't work, then I branch it off anyway so I can come back to it later.
Every couple of days I rebase all my branches against master, with the idea
being if it doesn't fall too far behind then any issues shouldn't be too hard
to fix. Sometimes it doesn't work out well, from start to finish aria2 took
me 3 months to figure out the issue with the tests. Or anything that touches
python.scm or another high-volume file does sometimes end up with issues.

I do also have my side repo for files/programs that either need more work or
aren't going to make it in. This is pretty easy with `export
GUIX_PACKAGE_PATH=~/workspace/my-guix/` in my .bashrc. Pastee has a python
command-line uploader with no license, that doesn't go anywhere. Quassel will
end up being 3 parts and it's not always easy working with our monolithic qt
package. Once that's done I'll figure out where to put it.

I've had a couple of times where I've combined two patches and had to figure
out separating them again.

-- 
Efraim Flashner   <address@hidden>   אפרים פלשנר
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