From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic =?utf-8?Q?Court=C3=A8s?=) Subject: Re: Adopt a patch! Date: Fri, 13 Oct 2017 15:08:53 +0200 Message-ID: <87376nnqje.fsf@gnu.org> References: <877ex5d555.fsf@gnu.org> <4fecd5dd.AEQAQDR72NkAAAAAAAAAAAOzWv8AAAACwQwAAAAAAAW9WABZudnG@mailjet.com> <87d16pf5x5.fsf@gnu.org> <3db6934a.AEQAQWrlP5MAAAAAAAAAAAOzWv8AAAACwQwAAAAAAAW9WABZwSg8@mailjet.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Return-path: Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([2001:4830:134:3::10]:45885) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1e2zi2-0005lk-Qz for guix-devel@gnu.org; Fri, 13 Oct 2017 09:09:04 -0400 Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1e2zhw-0001SQ-N5 for guix-devel@gnu.org; Fri, 13 Oct 2017 09:09:02 -0400 Received: from hera.aquilenet.fr ([2a01:474::1]:39082) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtps (TLS1.0:DHE_RSA_AES_256_CBC_SHA1:32) (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1e2zhw-0001S6-CD for guix-devel@gnu.org; Fri, 13 Oct 2017 09:08:56 -0400 In-Reply-To: <3db6934a.AEQAQWrlP5MAAAAAAAAAAAOzWv8AAAACwQwAAAAAAAW9WABZwSg8@mailjet.com> (Arun Isaac's message of "Tue, 19 Sep 2017 19:52:32 +0530") List-Id: "Development of GNU Guix and the GNU System distribution." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: guix-devel-bounces+gcggd-guix-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Sender: "Guix-devel" To: Arun Isaac Cc: guix-devel Hi Arun, Apologies for taking almost a month to reply! Arun Isaac skribis: >> At the time, Andy (I think) suggested that collaborative maintainership >> the way we do it might actually =E2=80=9Cwork better=E2=80=9D and scale = better. In the >> meantime, there have been long discussions in Debian about whether >> package maintainers should be dropped. Some rightfully argued that >> maintainership gives a sense of =E2=80=9Cownership=E2=80=9D to the maint= ainer(s), which, >> whether we want it or not, discourages others from contributing to the >> package. > > Yes, makes sense. Sometimes, "ownership" also makes maintainers somewhat > less polite. > >> I=E2=80=99m really summarizing here (there were a couple of articles on = LWN), > > Links to these articles would be nice. Do you have them? Here there are: https://lwn.net/Articles/708163/ https://lwn.net/Articles/704088/ > Just thinking out loud: Maybe, we need more people with commit > access. Theoretically, anyone can review a patch, but ultimately it is > people with commit access who will have to finally apply and push the > patch. As the rate of submission of patches grows, this increases the > work load on those with commit access. I agree we need more people with commit access. I very much encourage every committer to offer commit access to contributors who they deem ready for that. I think we=E2=80=99re often too shy, and that=E2=80=99s sa= d, because that means the project doesn=E2=80=99t scale up as well as it could. > More automation with regard to reviewing patches might help. For > example, would it be possible to automatically or semi-automatically > detect the license of a package? Many packages have multiple licenses, > and it is quite tedious to grep through the source code and identify all > the licenses involved. Even partial automation could be useful > here. Github does some kind of license detection. I have no idea what > kind of algorithm they use, though. =E2=80=98guix lint=E2=80=99 and =E2=80=98etc/indent-code.el=E2=80=99 provid= e some automation, but I agree we could do better. For license detection though, a tool could give a good guess, which would already be an improvement, but people would still have to review a bit more closely. Some tools exist, such as Fossology, but I think they=E2=80=99re pretty much designed to run as a Web service and are rather= hard to install and run directly on one=E2=80=99s machine. If someone would like to investigate things that could be done here, that could be very fruitful! > Also, I keep forgetting to return #t at the end of phases. Could there > be some way to auto-detect this? It=E2=80=99s hard to detect. Maybe =E2=80=98gnu-build-system=E2=80=99 coul= d print something when a phase returns the unspecified value, for instance? >> At the GHM, we were discussing that, probably, we=E2=80=99ll have to acc= ept for >> Guix to be a gateway to those repos (at least for the =E2=80=9Cnon-core= =E2=80=9D subsets >> of the repos). Concretely, one could do =E2=80=9Cguix package -i cpan!F= oo::Bar=E2=80=9D >> and have the package DAG imported and built live. It=E2=80=99s either t= hat or >> people will use CPAN=E2=80=99s own tools to achieve this. > > It would be nice to have some kind of "upstream packaging" (like > AppImage), so that developers can package their software themselves. It > would be a quick way for new projects to get people to try out their > work. I believe there has been discussion and work on these lines in > Guix. I'm not very familiar with it. I'll read up. =E2=80=98guix package/build/environment=E2=80=99 support loading definition= s from a =E2=80=98guix.scm=E2=80=99 file, which goes in that direction. However we = could certainly make it easier to use and advertise it more. Happy Friday! :-) Ludo=E2=80=99.