A Joyous Core-Updates Week-End 🎉

[Josselin Poiret]

Hello everyone,

It's that time of the year again!  Merging core-updates!  Do you *want*
glibc 2.35, gcc 11 as default, mesa 22, python 3.10, and more?!  Here's
your chance!

What is core-updates you ask?  It's the big branch where all changes
that affect significant parts of the dependency graph are pushed, to
avoid world rebuilds, and also to test them out.  This branch is then
merged back into the main one periodically, and of course, this is never
painless, as upgrading important dependencies like glibc or gcc are
going to cause issues.  Note that this workflow might change in the near
future though, see [1].

Some people have been hard at work fixing most of the build issues, and
we have most of the big changes sorted out now.  However, it's
impossible for the usual suspects to cover every single package, so we
would like to ask the wider community for their help with the merge.
Anyone can help, and in various ways (you don't need to know how to code
in Guile!).

This week-end (15–16 April), let's get everyone together and work on
core-updates!  Here's what you can do to help:


1) Use `guix time-machine` to test out your packages.

If you have a package manifest lying around (you can get one out of your
profile by using `guix package --export-manifest`), you can see which
packages are available by doing `guix time-machine --branch=core-updates
-- weather -m MANIFEST.SCM`!

You can also test the packages themselves by doing `guix time-machine
--branch=core-updates -- shell YOUR-PACKAGE`, at which point you'll be
in a shell with the new package available.  You can then try it out to
see if it works properly!


2) Hack on `core-updates`.

This is better to do beforehand: add a new worktree for core-updates
(you don't want to prune all of the .go files when switching between
master and core-updates, don't you?) using `git worktree add
../core-updates/ core-updates`.

You can then enter that directory and follow the instructions from the
manual, at "(guix)Building from Git".  You will have a checkout ready to
work on core-updates!  You can then try to build your manifest from the
checkout and see if everything builds, and try fixing the ones that
don't.


3) Hang out on #guix and on the MLs.

Follow what fellow members of the community are doing and struggling
with, cheer them on and/or offer them your assistance!  Feel free to
reply to this if you have any questions about the process, or with your
attempts, struggles and successes!


See you this week-end.

[1] 
https://gitlab.com/pjotrp/guix-days-fosdem-2023/-/blob/main/releases-branches.txt

Best,
-- 
Josselin Poiret

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