Re: splitting up and sorting commits?

[Liliana Marie Prikler <liliana.prikler@gmail.com>]

Am Mittwoch, dem 02.11.2022 um 00:05 +0000 schrieb Csepp:
> Hey all!
> 
> I'm working on a fairly sizeable MirageOS branch, just getting the
> hello-world kernel running involved adding about 40 packages.  Very
> often I run into a scenario where an imported package needs some
> other package to compile, and then that needs another, and then that
> another, and so on and so on, so by the time I can commit the first I
> have a plethora of new packages that should in theory all get their
> own commits.
> There are two problems with this:
> * Splitting up the commit is a pain, even with git add --patch,
> because hand editing the diff sucks and splitting does not work,
> possibly due to there not being enough space between defines for
> git's taste.
> * It is very easy for package to get added before their dependencies,
> so even though by the end of the commit chain everything builds
> perfectly fine, there are intermediate commits that can't be tested
> on their own.
> 
> How should one solve this?  I already spent way too much time on a
> script that I foolishly thought would be able to automatically sort
> commits based on their dependencies, but now I'm throwing in the
> towel, it's not getting anywhere.
zimoun mentioned etc/committer.scm, which is nice if it works for you,
but perhaps doesn't fully answer your question.  The pauper's solution
would be to keep a separate "scratch pad" file containing a bunch of
assorted guix packages, ordered in a way that all packages are defined
before they're used as inputs – you can easily maintain this order by
insertion sort.  Then, once the big package finally builds and you're
content with it, you can copy the definitions to the correct file(s) in
the guix tree one by one.

Cheers