[bug#74542] [PATCH v2 00/16] Improved tooling for package updates

[Suhail Singh <suhailsingh247@gmail.com>]

Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> writes:

>   • Short option for ‘--dependents’ is now ‘-P’ (instead of ‘-T’).

Thank you to both Simon and yourself for prioritizing some kind of
consistency between the various guix sub-commands.

>   • ‘package-with-upstream-version’ can preserve patches.  This turns
>     out to be a hard requirement if we want to make this useful.

I agree that this is essential.  At times, updates, can break existing
patches.  I am assuming it would be easy enough to spot such build
failures?  I.e., I am assuming that we will be preserving sufficient
details from the build log so core developers may be informed.

>   • Manifest is now limited to a dozen security-critical packages (I
>     left out leaf packages entirely; we can work on it separately
>     later).

Prioritizing the security-critical packages makes sense.  Especially
since we lack an automated "integration" QA system at the moment,
leaving the leaf packages for later is prudent.  The learnings from
trying this on the security-critical packages may also help inform the
approach we take for the other packages.

>   • Manifest is more precise: it refers to the packages to update by
>     their variable (rather than by package specs), which again makes
>     sure we’re upgrading the exact variant we want to upgrade.

I think this is an essential change as well.

> Thoughts?

Thank you for devoting time to this.  We need to improve our automation.

> I’d like to have the manifest built by CI soon so we can assess
> its usefulness and tweak it as needed.

Could we please add some minimal code to submit-patch-if-build-succeeds
to this series?  That would provide a working example of a CI job that
interacts with debbugs/sends-emails and would allow for greater eyeballs
on the working state of this jobset.

-- 
Suhail