Re: Questions about Git and workflow

[Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name>]

On Tue, Aug 18, 2020 at 08:38:39PM +0200, HiPhish wrote:
> My first question is regarding `guix git authenticate`. The first time I ran it 
> after a `git clone ...` and `guix environment guix` I got an error saying that 
> the `keyring` branch cannot be found. So I did a `git checkout --track origin/
> keyring`, but I got a different error instead:
> 
>     $ guix git authenticate 9edb3f66fd807b096b48283debdcddccfea34bad "BBB0 
> 2DDF 2CEA F6A8 0D1D  E643 A2A0 6DF2 A33A 54FA"
>     Authenticating commits 9edb3f6 to ec32c85 (3 new commits)...
>     guix git: error: commit ec32c8591eb111023db514800145532a1e454125 not 
> signed by an authorized key: F5DA 2032 4B87 3D0B 7A38  7672 0DB0 FF88 4F55 
> 6D79
> 
> Finally I did a `git pull` on both the `keyring` and the `master` branch and 
> the check passed.
> 
> So my first question is: did I do it correctly? If not, what is the correct 
> workflow?

It sounds like you did it correctly. After bringing the 'keyring' branch
up to date, the authentication succeeded. If you want to explore more,
compare the keyring branch before and after you updated it.

> My second question is regarding the `.po` files which get changed during the 
> build process. Git shows me a number of language-specific files as modified, even 
> though I never touched them by hand. Should those changes be commited? Should 
> I include them when I send a patch? Why are they even version-controlled if 
> they get changed automatically?

I ignore these changes. When they occur I do `git checkout po` to erase
them. I don't really know what's "correct" here but we can expect some
minor annoyances like this in the development environment.

> My last question is about the local state directory. The manual says the pass 
> my current local state directory (by default `/var`) to `./configure`, but then 
> my store gets mutated. I would prefer not to store my weird experiments where 
> my day-to-day packages lie. I know I can revert at any time, but I'd rather 
> not. I instead created `./var` and passed `$(pwd)/var` to `./configure`. The 
> question is, is this the way to go? When I tried building a package (`/pre-
> inst-env guix install go-github-com-junegunn-fzf`) Guix complained that there 
> was no deamon running, so do I need a second shell running the deamon (`sudo -
> E ./pre-inst-env guix-daemon --build-users-group=guixbuild`) as well?

I recommend not using a different local state directory. There should
not be any negative (or even observable) effects of your experimental
artifacts being in /gnu/store. I haven't tried managing multiple stores
but I assume you'd need to run a separate daemon for each, configured
for the correct directories.