Re: Discussion on Guix funding // future

[Greg Hogan <code@greghogan.com>]

On Fri, Oct 25, 2024 at 10:21 AM Noé Lopez via Development of GNU Guix
and the GNU System distribution. <guix-devel@gnu.org> wrote:
>
> Furthermore, on the topic of mail, I totally agree with David
> Thompson. Mail is cool, I get it, but another way to contribute like
> pull requests on a forgejo/gitlab mirror would be much, much easier.
> Mail might seem like the default easy thing for many of you, but for
> anyone that’s a new contributor needing to configure send-mail and
> making sure that your email was received and that you receive the
> replies, not seeing it appear on the issues list for a little while is
> quite inconvenient compared to using git, pushing on your fork and
> continuing with a web interface from there.

Can the suggested, user-friendly alternatives to email integrate into
the build cluster, QA, and teams-branches workflow?

WIth 29,000+ packages the nature of the project has changed from
adding new software to managing updates (what fraction of new packages
are rust or python dependencies?).

What we have works well but Guix needs even more tooling and
automation! We have importers and updaters. There exist innumerable
free software updates, of which Guix only applies a pseudorandom few.
Much of this could be automated using the existing tooling for
updating package versions and building dependents. We can automate
multi-versioning ('pinning') libraries for upgrade failures.

Guix should be capable of things like keeping git up-to-date, but this
isn't scaling. #73309 was submitted two weeks ago. #70656, submitted
by a core contributor six months ago, reduces the git dependents from
921 to 136 and appears overlooked. We need more of the latter
submissions in order to better automate the former (#70031 does this
for cmake). As noted recently, "upgrading Numpy and friends" is
challenging. How can that process be improved?

If our goal is "how can I keep package X up-to-date" rather than "can
I update package X", it isn't clear to me that moving to forgejo or
gitlab takea Guix in that direction.

Greg