bug#42212: [PATCH 1/1] self: Use nearest tag as the version string in documentation.

[zimoun <zimon.toutoune@gmail.com>]

Hi,

On Mon, 20 Jul 2020 at 14:32, Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> wrote:

> > But, like zimoun, I didn't understand why we can't rebuild the manual
> > every commit. Rebuilding the manual is quite cheap. So, substituting it
> > shouldn't be a problem, right?
>
> Try rebuilding the manual + translations by yourself: it takes a few
> minutes (see also commit a524a31de43b330c911fb08ae02fcd880d32aa04
> related commits).
>
> Also, if you don’t build it by yourself, you have to download its
> substitutes, which is also not free.

Not free but still cheap enough. :-)

downloading from
https://ci.guix.gnu.org/nar/lzip/p8xbha1fl3j23q05iya43ypzhzjmyr0j-guix-manual
...
 guix-manual  4.4MiB

Especially compared to the other parts of "guix pull".

> So it’s really important to rebuild only when we have to.  (guix self)
> is written in that spirit.
>
> >> One way to avoid that would be to look at the latest commit that touch
> >> doc/ instead of the latest commit overall (I think that’s what zimoun
> >> was suggesting).  Roughly run ‘git describe’ on ‘git log doc/’, so to
> >> speak.  (Using Guile-Git.)

It was not what I was suggesting but it is the next step of my question. :-)

Naively, is it not a situation about kind of grafts?

If the last commit modifying the documentation is 1234abcd, then other
changes unrelated to documentation are committed, say commit wxyz5678,
I would expect to have that commit wxyz5678 appears in the
documentation. As it seems the case with
guix.gnu.org/manual/devel/en/.
So, the documentation should be built with the commit 1234abcd and
probably substituable, then grafted to refer to the last commit
wxyz5648 where it is required.  Even if referring to commit 1234abcd
will be already enough.

All the best,
simon