Re: Guix Days: Patch flow discussion

[Andreas Enge <andreas@enge.fr>]

Hello Dan,

thanks for your thoughts! I think I will restrict my replies to guix-devel
to keep them in one place; the following are just my personal opinions.

Am Thu, Feb 29, 2024 at 03:41:41PM +0000 schrieb Daniel Littlewood:
> Something that is not obvious to me when people refer to reviewing patches, is
> whether this is purely a matter of adding new packages to the main guix
> channel, or of reviewing changes to the system in general, or both. As a
> novice, I can imagine becoming comfortable as a package reviewer much more
> quickly than as a reviewer of core patches to the system.

Both! And indeed what you write is correct, reviewing packages is easier
than services, which is probably easier than other changes. (Personally,
I feel confident only with packages.) Of course then people should only
review things they are comfortable with.

> It's also not obvious to me whether you mean exactly "reviewing a backlog of
> existing patches" or additionally "increasing the amount of patches submitted
> and applied". I feel like both are probably good things but I can't tell what
> you're focussing on exactly. If lots of gems were imported from other repos
> like RubyGems and PyPi, which as I understand it is currently a
> partly-automatic partly-manual process, would that be considered a win? What
> about increasing version coverage among those packages that are covered?

The discussion was about the backlog; in particular also about negative
feelings by contributors of patches that take a long time to be applied.
Of course adding more packages is also a welcome activitiy (but only
makes sense if enough of them are applied in the end...). We concentrated
on "reviewing" to ease the burden of "committers", since reviewing is open
to anybody.

> One point brought up here is about tooling. I wonder whether there is any scope
> for fully automatic review.

I do not think so. Quality is an important aspect of Guix; for instance,
we ask for non-marketing descriptions, which would be difficult to test
automatically. We already have "guix lint", which does some of the work.
And there are fully automated channels such as for CRAN, but which then
are potentially of a lesser quality.

Notice that "easy" packages are also easy to review; most of the time,
there is not much to do about the result of "guix import pypi ...".
Things become more tricky when phases need to be added, to understand
what is going on, and then I usually also look at comments (or criticise
their absence).

> I think some people are just scared off socially by the idea of having to join a
> meeting in order to learn how to do reviews well.

Agreed, there should not be any "having to join a meeting". The idea of
organising one comes from the goal of making the activity more social and
less boring. Apart from that, you can start today and need not wait for
a bug squashing party :)

Andreas