Re: A Joyous Core-Updates Week-End 🎉

[John Kehayias]

Hi Guix,

On Wed, Apr 12, 2023 at 12:16 AM, Josselin Poiret wrote:

> 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!
>

Time flies! Big thanks to Andreas especially for really shepherding (no pun 
intended) us
to an already good state.

> 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:
>

Thanks for organizing! I know many are in Europe (US here) so I may miss a lot 
of people
due to time zone/schedule, but looking forward to helping out. I've been away 
from Guix a
bit due to some other stuff but hope to put my eyes for review and commit 
access to good
use to help out with everyone's hard work.

>
> 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!
>

I also want to stress this point, more testing of your favorite package (or 
reconfiguring
your system to core-updates if you are feeling more adventurous) is really 
helpful. So
don't be afraid even if you have no idea what's happening under the hood.

>
> 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!
>

Question on procedure: are we going to be posting every patch to guix-patches 
and waiting
for QA to build? Or only for not trivial (whatever that means) patches? I guess 
I'm asking
if this will be a sort of sprint weekend and larger changes/cleanup in the 
aftermath? This
depends on context of course, but in light of recent discussions on patch 
pushing, QA, and
teams (that I need to catch up on) I wanted to see what we were doing here.

>
> See you this week-end.
>
> [1] 
> <https://gitlab.com/pjotrp/guix-days-fosdem-2023/-/blob/main/releases-branches.txt>
>
> Best,

Thanks again, see you all on IRC and git logs this weekend!

John