Re: New “ungrafting” branch

[Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name>]

On Thu, Jan 21, 2021 at 12:15:28PM +0100, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> Apologies for not contributing so far, this month is busy for me.  I
> think the slow feedback loop with ci.guix is one of the main reasons
> people don’t contribute much.  Perhaps the whole process is also unclear
> to people who’re not seasoned contributors?

I understand. It wasn't realistic for me to assume people would be
around at this time of year.

The issues with CI definitely dissuade people, including me. I decided
to do this staging cycle because I really want / need a working alsa-lib
for foreign distros.

The CI process is confusing, even to seasoned contributors. That's my
experience as someone who led core-updates on Hydra. Getting a shell
account on berlin helped immensely, because it allows me to retry
building derivations "by hand". But, it's not so good that that is the
level we are working at, in my opinion.

Mathieu Othacehe's work is improving the situation rapidly, and the Guix
Data Service has helped immensely, since I started learning about it.
The Guix Build Coordinator is also great.

I think that we will be in better shape for the next cycle, which I
suppose will be core-updates. I recommend waiting a couple months to
begin building it.