Package test service for GNU maintainers

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Hello!

As a part of a discussion about “cool features for GNU maintainers” at
the GHM, someone (Andreas, IIRC) suggested having a service (possibly a
Web service) that would allow maintainers to upload their (pre)release
tarballs and then get some feedback:

  • If the package is not available in the distro, it would just say
    “sorry, your package is not available in the distro, but you can
    help!”.  Something like that.  ;-)

  • If the package is available, it would do something equivalent to
    ‘guix build foo --with-source=foo.tar.gz’ and eventually return the
    build result.

    Upon success, it could also return a generated patch that can be
    sent to guix-devel for inclusion.

    It could also use something similar to ‘guix refresh
    --list-dependent’ to try building dependent packages, or at least
    tell the maintainer to check them.

I think we have most of the tools to do that, and it may be a good way
to entice GNU maintainers into contributing to Guix.  Since it’s a
lightweight process, we could suggest to make it a recommendation in the
maintainer’s guide.

Thoughts?  Who want to give it a go?  :-)

Thanks,
Ludo’.