Re: Should commits rather be buildable or small

[Philip McGrath <philip@philipmcgrath.com>]

On 12/10/23 18:20, Attila Lendvai wrote:
>>> FWIW, this commit policy has always bothered me as a newcomer to
>>> Guix. pretty much everywhere else it's a major offence against your
>>> colleagues to commit something that breaks the build in any way.
>>
>>
>> In the last few months I’ve repeatedly seen assertions in a similar
>> style as this one. They always genuinely surprise me, and it’s probably
>> not just because I’m oblivious and out of touch.
> 
> 
> well, both point of views are reasonable. they just make different tradeoffs.
> 

I find it hard to see any benefit to anyone from making commits so small 
that they are known to break things that will be fixed later in the same 
series. Even aside from `guix time-machine`, substitute building, and 
the like, a human reading the diff won't be able to see what the true 
impact of the change is.

On the concrete issue:


On 12/10/23 10:28, Saku Laesvuori wrote:
 >> However, in each commit at least the package touched in that
 >> commit ought to build.
 > This should, of course, be theoretically possible with at least one
 > update order but I don't know how would I discover that order (more
 > efficiently than by trial and error. I don't want to try ~800² different
 > combinations).

Preparing a large set of updates like this is already a great deal of 
work. It does not seem to me like a good use of volunteers' time to ask 
them to break such an update into hundreds of tiny pieces, especially 
not if the result is hundreds of broken commits to Guix.

Philip