bug#65391: Acknowledgement (People need to report failing builds even though we have ci.guix.gnu.org for that)

[Simon Tournier <zimon.toutoune@gmail.com>]

Hi,

On Tue, 29 Aug 2023 at 10:45, Maxim Cournoyer <maxim.cournoyer@gmail.com> wrote:

> It's frustrating for users when a package is missing, but it's also
> frustrating/inefficient for maintainers to stumble upon broken packages
> when checking if an upgrade broke dependent packages (it takes time to
> build them just to find out they fail, and researching they already
> did), so a balance is needed.

There is nothing worse as an user to have this experience:

    guix search foobar

oh cool, foobar is there, let try it,

    guix shell foobar

    … wait …
    … stuff are building …
    … laptop is burning …
    … wait …
    Bang!

Keeping broken packages is just annoyances.  Contributor are annoyed
because as said by the paragraph above.  And user are annoyed as
described just above.

I am in favor to set a policy for removing then.

The question is the way to detect them.  QA can do whatever we want but
until people are helping Chris because, IMHO, Chris is already enough
busy to keep stuff running, we probably need to keep our process simple
enough in order to stay actionable and avoid some vacuum of “coulda,
shoulda or woulda”.  For what my opinion is worth on that. :-)

Cheers,
simon