Re: developing for guix with git

[Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net>]

Nils Gillmann <niasterisk@grrlz.net> writes:

> 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.

It’s hard to say without being able to take a look at the state of the
branch.  It is possible that a change you introduced in your branch
broke things.  Maybe you could share error messages?

> 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 think of a branch as a pointer to a some commit in the graph.
Rebasing takes a range of commits and applies the changes they introduce
on top of some other commit.

When things suddenly break after rebasing the reason is usually in of
two categories:

* one of your (now relocated) commits broke something

* after rebasing, master commits that have been added since you first
  committed your changes are now part of the history of your commits —
  maybe these commits altered assumptions that were still valid when you
  first committed your changes.  An example for this is when a variable
  was renamed or moved in a master commit and your commits still use the
  old name.

Sharing some error output with us might help us identify what’s going on
in your case.  In any case, you could try bisecting your changes (divide
the set of your commits in half, and see if things are broken at that
commit; then recurse until you find the commit that introduced the cause
for the failure).  This works best when you made many small commits.

I’m using multiple branches for things that take me too long.  For most
developments, however, I’m working in a local “wip” branch, which is
regularly and in short intervals rebased onto master.

~~ Ricardo