bug#53533: [DISCUSSION] Quality of services in reproducible build environment Guix

[Sharlatan Hellseher <sharlatanus@gmail.com>]

Hi Guix team!

The current QA for the accepted changes in Gujx is far away from
trustible. For example, some
changes in package update may cause a faileur of the whole chain of
packages depending on it. It
would be nice to have some soft policy of changes, check list or some
procedure to have a "stable"
branch which may guarantee all packages build successfully and pass of
all enabled tests.

I find current [[id:60941898-0ed4-4188-b473-d2dcda158d61][CI/CD]]
(https://ci.guix.gnu.org/) is missleading in case of providing some
visibility
of all successful builds for the current pushed changes (on master
branch). I would like to conclude
from the CI is which commit broke how many packages. Other open
question - if I've sticked to a
specific "stable" branch how I may be sure that another ~guix pull~
will not break my packages in
case of un-pinned version?

Some missing features of CI
- Timing - current view has missing a clear representation of build date-time
- Overall slats for the current commit to the specific branch - and
how many package are become
  broken after update of package X.
- Sort of "blocking on merge" of a commit which causes some issues (do
not merge broken packages
  into stable branch)
- Some documentation for all UI features (green dots, red dots, grey dots etc.
  https://ci.guix.gnu.org/eval/54326/dashboard)

Some missing practice of packaging:
- Some essential message of the reason why tests were disabled and any
sort of suggestions on how to
  make them enabled. Contact upstream if required.
- Before sending patch make sure (at least for the localhost
architecture) it's built, linted and in
  case of bumping version - all dependent chain still can be built.

Related commits and issues which broke other packages in ~master~ branch:
- https://issues.guix.gnu.org/53230
- fix 6445f412b993ec7b52dc4c81e99f49af38b3a967 RawTherapee stopped
building with wrong configure key,
  the previous update to 5.8 was never tested before been merged.

  #+begin_src sh
git checkout master
git pull
git log -n1 --pretty="%h %s %cd - %cn"
  #+end_src
  : 4235c6ee92 gnu: QGIS: Build without QtWebKit. Tue Jan 25 15:10:19
2022 -0500 - Leo Famulari

  Excess changes which could be prevented with just local attempt to build
  #+begin_src sh
git log --grep="Fix build" --pretty="%h %s %cd - %cn" | wc -l
  #+end_src
  : 1025


-- 
… наш разум - превосходная объяснительная машина которая способна
найти смысл почти в чем угодно, истолковать любой феномен, но
совершенно не в состоянии принять мысль о непредсказуемости.