Re: Poetry upgrade and related packages

[Tanguy LE CARROUR <tanguy@bioneland.org>]

Hi,


Excerpts from Ludovic Courtès's message of December 5, 2020 4:44 pm:
> Tanguy LE CARROUR <tanguy@bioneland.org> skribis:
> 
>> It's not yet clear to me how to handle (python) package updates:
>> - when to update;
>> - when not to update;
>> - when to introduce "versionned" (`-x.y` suffix) package definitions;
>> - when to introduce "next" (`/next` suffix) package definitions;
>> - when to remove the two above suffixes;
>> - …
>>
>> So I'm looking forward to reading the answers to this thread! :-)
> 
> When a change introduces too many rebuilds, the convention is to make
> that change on a branch that will be merged “later” rather than on
> ‘master’; this is bullet 8 here:
> 
>   https://guix.gnu.org/manual/devel/en/html_node/Submitting-Patches.html

Thanks for pointing at, but this "just" tells me on which branch to put
the changeset, not which of the above options should be used when a
package needs to be updated.


> Yet, sometimes we want to introduce new versions that people can get in
> their profile, even if the “default” one remains the older version to
> avoid world rebuilds.

That's exactly my point! If the default one lags behind, then after some
time, nobody will use it any more and we will have introduced one or more
`-x.y` package definitions!
I would consider it to be a "saner" approach to have the default always
"point" to the latest version, but then we would have to "fix" package
depending on older versions by introducing `-x.y` package definitions
for them.

Or am I missing something?!


> One example is GDB: gdb@8 has 1,671 dependents, but we added gdb@10 on
> the side such that “guix install gdb” gives you version 10.

The difference here is that it's a package added to a profile, not a
dependency, so `gdb` means the latest available version of GDB, right?

As you can see, everything is not yet clear to me! Sorry! ^_^'

-- 
Tanguy