Re: ‘core-updates’ schedule

[ng0 <contact.ng0@cryptolab.net>]

Leo Famulari transcribed 1.1K bytes:
> On Thu, Apr 06, 2017 at 10:34:29AM +0200, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> > This ‘core-updates’ cycle was terribly long, so I suggest to write down
> > a schedule and then try hard to stick to it.  ;-)
> 
> At the beginning of the cycle, I was confident that we could build and
> merge it in 2 or 3 weeks. But, it took about 6 weeks before we could
> merge.
> 
> Something we can all do to speed up the process is try `guix package -u`
> and `guix system build`, starting at the beginning of the freeze. [0]
> 
> You will find build failures before they show up on Hydra, and find bugs
> and regressions before we merge core-updates into master. Our build farm
> is relatively slow and unreliable, so it's inefficient to wait for it to
> find build failures; it won't find applications bugs at all in many
> cases.
> 
> > Last but not least: who wants to be the timekeeper?  The position mostly
> > consists in firmly reminding people of the schedule.  :-)
> 
> I tried to do it this time around, but we kept finding bugs and
> experiencing build failures that we couldn't ignore.
> 
> [0] I was able to rely on core-updates after ~3 weeks (excluding
> libreoffice).
> 

Recently I've started studying other communities and how they function,
among them Rust. I wonder how much of what Guix does can be further
automated.
So that it maybe doesn't take 6 weeks or more for certain features to be
merged (building the binary substitutes is another issue of time and
resources).