Re: developing for guix with git

[Nils Gillmann <niasterisk@grrlz.net>]

Efraim Flashner <efraim@flashner.co.il> writes:

> On Thu, 28 Jan 2016 12:31:09 +0100
> Ni* Gillmann <niasterisk@grrlz.net> wrote:
>
>> Following yesterdays "bug" I have a question which is only partly Guix
>> related and more development/git style related.
>> 
>> I am used to develop on things which I do not have to build and they
>> usually just work. Branching was never an issue.
>> However with guix it started to become one apparently, as I can build
>> the guix sourcetree from git clone with the master checkout but not
>> while being on the local branch I created to work on lispf4, which does
>> track the master.
>> 
>> I know it used to work, but this is strange for me. What are some ways,
>> other than directly working on master and rebasing often, people here do
>> interact with git while working on guix? In other words, how do you
>> locally handle guix development?
>
> I know you asked for ideas that didn't involve working against master and
> rebasing, but that's really pretty much what I do. I find something that I
> want to package or update and work on it. If it's good, then I run `git
> checkout -b $branch_name` and send the patches off to the mailing list. If it
> doesn't work, then I branch it off anyway so I can come back to it later.
> Every couple of days I rebase all my branches against master, with the idea
> being if it doesn't fall too far behind then any issues shouldn't be too hard
> to fix. Sometimes it doesn't work out well, from start to finish aria2 took
> me 3 months to figure out the issue with the tests. Or anything that touches
> python.scm or another high-volume file does sometimes end up with
> issues.

Thanks for your input, Efraim.
Do you happen to know why guix in the situation I described,
being on an up to date branch following master refuses to build,
but once I switch to master branch, make clean, make clean-go (or
go-clean?) and run make (and the other commands) again it builds
successfully? This was my initial confusion.
I might have a thing or 2 to learn about rebasing and branching, but in
theory from what I know it shouldn't really matter which branch I am
on unless something's corrupted or broken.

>
> I do also have my side repo for files/programs that either need more work or
> aren't going to make it in. This is pretty easy with `export
> GUIX_PACKAGE_PATH=~/workspace/my-guix/` in my .bashrc. Pastee has a python
> command-line uploader with no license, that doesn't go anywhere. Quassel will
> end up being 3 parts and it's not always easy working with our monolithic qt
> package. Once that's done I'll figure out where to put it.
>
> I've had a couple of times where I've combined two patches and had to figure
> out separating them again.

-- 
ng/ni*
vcard: http://krosos.sdf.org