2017-06-08 19:08 GMT+02:00 Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name>:

> On Thu, Jun 08, 2017 at 10:01:56AM -0400, Mark H Weaver wrote:
> > I'm annoyed that I've been forced to either use a different desktop
> > environment in the meantime or else sacrifice security updates.  I would
> > never consider pushing such a major update to master without testing it
> > first.  I'm astonished that anyone thinks that this is acceptable
> > behavior.
> >
> > I'm sorry to be harsh, but I feel justified to air my grievances because
> > I believe this is the kind of event that will cause GNOME users to label
> > GuixSD an experimental distribution that's not suitable for one's
> > primary work machine, but are too polite to complain.  Let me be the
> > canary in the coal mine.
>
> I agree with your points. For complex interactive software, someone must
> test it by actually using it. And we should remember that the master
> branch is supposed to always be "deployable", and choose to test
> breaking changes on other branches.
>
> > While it's true that users can boot into an older generation of their
> > system in an emergency, and that's a *great* comfort, in general it's
> > not an acceptable fallback because it entails sacrificing security
> > updates.  I'm concerned that our fallback feature has caused people to
> > become quite careless with breaking things on our master branch.
>
> It's true, we could not even think of pushing untested or lightly-tested
> changes if we couldn't roll-back.
>
> But, if we want to 1) receive updates to big software suites like GNOME,
> and we want to 2) avoid breakage on the master branch, we *need* more
> testers.
>
> As somebody who has helped with a few of these branches so far, the lack
> of assistance with testing and bug fixes is a major problem. I rarely
> feel as confident as I'd like before pushing the merge. More than once
> I've merged a major branch with the impression that only myself and 1 or
> 2 other people have actually deployed it on their workstation or in a
> staging environment that precedes production.
>
> There is a large number of contributors adding new packages or working
> on features, but almost nobody helps test big changes or other boring
> and tedious maintenance tasks. So, those things suffer, and we end up
> testing on the master branch. I don't have any potential solutions in
> mind. As we are mostly volunteers with limited time and computing
> resources, we can only do so much.
>

I'd love to help with testing the Gnome desktop

The reason why I abstain is because if the desktop environment turns out to
be broken, like in this case,  I wouldn't know how to work around that

I'm lost in the command line, I'm not even sure I could manage to access
the so called consoles or that I could open an alternative desktop
environment

If I had a spare computer I would use that.

Unless using a qemu based virtual machine is a good enough solution

If it is, then here I am

Send me an email, indicate me a branch and I'll test it