Guile 2.1.8 on 9 March / 2.2.0 on 16 March

Guile 2.1.8 on 9 March / 2.2.0 on 16 March

[Andy Wingo]

Hi,

An update on Guile 2.2 status.  As I mentioned in a previous mail, I
think the master branch is good to go.  I spent some time over the last
week going over bugs; I have looked at all bugs in our database (!),
fixed a number of them (check https://debbugs.gnu.org/rrd/guile.html!),
and I think from those bugs I have no release blockers.  I am a little
behind on guile-devel still but hope to catch up shortly; that's my only
remaining backlog.

I have forward-ported all appropriate patches from 2.0 except the
reproducible-build patches.  I am hoping Ludovic will take that up :)
So we are caught up there as well.

There are still the release blocker discussions ongoing: foreign
objects, macro-introduced toplevel identifiers, and GOOPS incompatible
changes.

I think though that we are looking pretty good for a final 2.1.8
prerelease on 9 March (in 1 week).  Then we can let people build it, fix
any build errors, try it out on various platforms or whatever, and get
out a 2.2.0 on 16 March.

I would point people to hydra tarballs to test but it seems we broke
Hydra with the dist-lzip patch :)  I reverted that patch on both
branches and hopefully we have new disted tarballs for checking in a few
hours.

Finally for the release we should consider publicity -- what do we do?
Anything special?  Volunteers are welcome here.  The NEWS is quite
verbose, so condensing it into a set of 5-10 big-ticket items could be
useful; dunno.

Maybe we can use this as an opportunity to get people to try Guix
actually -- if we cut a 2.2.0 tarball a day before and get it into Guix
and get guile-next built, perhaps we could offer a binary installation
option for people on GNU machines (via Guix).  Dunno; thoughts here are
welcome.

OK, that's all from me.  Happy hacking :)

Andy

Re: Guile 2.1.8 on 9 March / 2.2.0 on 16 March

[Arne Babenhauserheide]

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Andy Wingo <wingo@pobox.com> writes:

> Finally for the release we should consider publicity -- what do we do?
> Anything special?  Volunteers are welcome here.  The NEWS is quite
> verbose, so condensing it into a set of 5-10 big-ticket items could be
> useful; dunno.

One important point would be to send advance press releases with an
explicit EMBARGO (not to be released before ... = EMBARGOED UNTIL ...)
to many newspapers, including as many as possible in India, china and
any other non-US country with many programmers.

Best wishes,
Arne
-- 
Unpolitisch sein
heißt politisch sein
ohne es zu merken

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Re: Guile 2.1.8 on 9 March / 2.2.0 on 16 March

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hello Guilers!

Andy Wingo <wingo@pobox.com> skribis:

> An update on Guile 2.2 status.  As I mentioned in a previous mail, I
> think the master branch is good to go.  I spent some time over the last
> week going over bugs; I have looked at all bugs in our database (!),
> fixed a number of them (check https://debbugs.gnu.org/rrd/guile.html!),
> and I think from those bugs I have no release blockers.  I am a little
> behind on guile-devel still but hope to catch up shortly; that's my only
> remaining backlog.

Woohoo, thanks a lot!

> I have forward-ported all appropriate patches from 2.0 except the
> reproducible-build patches.  I am hoping Ludovic will take that up :)

Will do!

> I think though that we are looking pretty good for a final 2.1.8
> prerelease on 9 March (in 1 week).  Then we can let people build it, fix
> any build errors, try it out on various platforms or whatever, and get
> out a 2.2.0 on 16 March.

Sounds like a plan.

One thing that takes time is getting test feedback on non-GNU/Linux and
non-x86_64 platforms.  Perhaps now is a good time to email
platform-testers@gnu.org, or somehow ping people.

The next pre-release could also be announced on info-gnu with an
explicit call for testing?

> I would point people to hydra tarballs to test but it seems we broke
> Hydra with the dist-lzip patch :)  I reverted that patch on both
> branches and hopefully we have new disted tarballs for checking in a few
> hours.

I’ve just added lzip as an input for the CI jobs on hydra.nixos.org, so
you should be able to revert the revert shortly.  :-)

  http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/hydra-recipes.git/commit/?id=d642c76d08ed56caecd9502e1aaa8ebbd1cb840b

> Finally for the release we should consider publicity -- what do we do?
> Anything special?  Volunteers are welcome here.  The NEWS is quite
> verbose, so condensing it into a set of 5-10 big-ticket items could be
> useful; dunno.

At FOSDEM, a number of people were already doing exciting stuff with
2.2.  I’d encourage interested people to write an article that we’d
publish on gnu.org/s/guile about what they do and how 2.2 enabled that.
Think 8sync, Fibers, Sly and its successor, Daniel’s array work, etc.

> Maybe we can use this as an opportunity to get people to try Guix
> actually -- if we cut a 2.2.0 tarball a day before and get it into Guix
> and get guile-next built, perhaps we could offer a binary installation
> option for people on GNU machines (via Guix).  Dunno; thoughts here are
> welcome.

We can definitely make 2.2 available on day 1 in Guix.   :-)

This reminds me that on the last guile-next update I stumbled upon a
problem with test-out-of-memory:

  https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-devel/2017-01/msg00053.html

We can work around it in Guix, but it would be nice to address it.

Thank you for driving us in these exciting times!  :-)

Ludo’.