Re: Should commits rather be buildable or small

[John Kehayias <john.kehayias@protonmail.com>]

Hi everyone,

And sorry for reviving an old thread, but I am faced with a similar issue for updating vulkan, with the patch series submitted by dan (cc'ed): <https://issues.guix.gnu.org/69461>. I thought I would get some opinions here, please see below:

On Mon, Dec 11, 2023 at 12:51 PM, Ricardo Wurmus wrote:

> Attila Lendvai <attila@lendvai.name> writes:
>
>> i myself also had headaches multiple times when i fixed something that
>> needed to touch several different packages, and they would only work
>> when applied in one transaction:
>>

In this case all the vulkan packages share a version through a variable name. I would assume packages wouldn't like mixed versions, but maybe some would work (I haven't tried). I'll be taking this series on mesa-updates with related changes, so the plan is that when it hits master there are no/few broken packages and full substitute coverage. So perhaps this makes this more of a style and convention question.

Some options:

1. Essentially squash to one commit where all of vulkan is updated in one commit. The main upside is that nothing should break (within vulkan, dependents to be fixed as needed) and it shows as "one" change; the main downside is that the proposed changes are not just trivial version bumps. Harder to then disentangle as needed.

2. Make each commit updating a package, but don't use the variable %vulkan-sdk-version, updating each package with a version as it is done. Then do a commit where all the versions are replaced by the variable. This seems like unnecessary work to me and while it stops the obvious breaking (source hashes don't match once variable is updated but package hasn't yet) versions are still mixed which is likely a problem.

3. Go with the series as proposed: this means after the first commit for sure all other vulkan packages and dependents don't build, as the source hashes won't match until the commit that updates that package. Along with version mixing, this perhaps doesn't give you a helpful git bisect either?

None are perfect. What do people think?

My instinct is to go with the series as proposed (after review) accepting that there will be for sure builds failing if time traveling to the middle of the series. I don't think we can really avoid that anyway, as sometimes we only see an issue after a commit and it is fixed some time later. We could have a note in the first commit that this requires the next n commits to update vulkan packages. That might help if someone is on an intermediate commit and can see quickly in git log this note.

Or perhaps we can note something is part of a dependent series when we make commits so this is easier for someone to tell in general?

Thanks!
John