Forge and build automation

["Ludovic Courtès" <ludo@gnu.org>]

Hello!

(“As an online Guix discussion grows longer, the probability of ending
up talking about the email workflow approaches 1.”)

Greg Hogan <code@greghogan.com> skribis:

> On Fri, Oct 25, 2024 at 10:21 AM Noé Lopez via Development of GNU Guix
> and the GNU System distribution. <guix-devel@gnu.org> wrote:
>>
>> Furthermore, on the topic of mail, I totally agree with David
>> Thompson. Mail is cool, I get it, but another way to contribute like
>> pull requests on a forgejo/gitlab mirror would be much, much easier.
>> Mail might seem like the default easy thing for many of you, but for
>> anyone that’s a new contributor needing to configure send-mail and
>> making sure that your email was received and that you receive the
>> replies, not seeing it appear on the issues list for a little while is
>> quite inconvenient compared to using git, pushing on your fork and
>> continuing with a web interface from there.
>
> Can the suggested, user-friendly alternatives to email integrate into
> the build cluster, QA, and teams-branches workflow?

At work, we have integrated Cuirass (guix.bordeaux.inria.fr) with GitLab
(gitlab.inria.fr) for the purposes of testing merge requests for our
channels.  It’s wonderful, really.

As someone who’s often repelled by web interfaces, I have also
experimented with forge.el, an Emacs interface to Git{Hub,Lab}, Forgejo,
and more; it is “promising”.

But…

> WIth 29,000+ packages the nature of the project has changed from
> adding new software to managing updates (what fraction of new packages
> are rust or python dependencies?).

… that’s the crux of the problem.  What works for our little channels
mentioned above is insufficient for the main ‘guix’ channel.

qa.guix is a very adequate tool.  Should we decide to experiment with
something like Forgejo, we would need to make sure its webhooks can be
understood by qa.guix.

Surely not insurmountable, and worth considering.  We “just” need more
hands to try that out.


Besides, I agree with you Greg that we need more automation, in
particular for package updates.  Nixpkgs has an auto-update bot; we
could just as well have a bot that roughly runs ‘guix refresh’ and
submits patches/merge requests.  I’m sure somebody will end up
scratching this particular itch, it’s such an obvious thing to do.

Thanks,
Ludo’.

PS: It’s a long thread and I do mean to comment on other issues, but
    it’s going to take me a while.  :-)