Re: core-updates invites to an ungrafting party

[John Kehayias]

Hi Maxim et al,

On Sun, Oct 08, 2023 at 11:12 AM, Maxim Cournoyer wrote:

> Hello Guix!
>
> The core-updates branch is still alive, and has accumulated (or plans
> to) a few changes that cause world-rebuilds, such as fixes to
> git-minimal (bug#65924) as well as docbook improvements (bug#65479) and
> fixes to the build systems so that deep input rewriting works as
> intended (bug#65665).
>
> I think we could also batch ungrafting of all grafted packages, to make
> the most out of this complete rebuild.
>

That sounds good, we have suddenly got a bunch of grafts deep in the
dependency tree.

Speaking of which, I was planning to at least ungraft libx11 and
libxpm, recipients of recent grafts for security reasons, on a
forthcoming mesa-updates branch. I'm just waiting for the next point
release of mesa, since 23.2.1 is actually the first release where
typically a first .1 release is considered the start of the stable
series. (Though 23.2 has had a long release candidate time.)

So, what are we thinking of the time to build/merge core-updates? I
was hoping to do some ungrafting and updating in the mesa-related
ecosystem this week, depending on upstream.

I'll start a separate thread soon to ask for what patches to include
there that I don't already know about, but I'm happy to include
similar scope ungrafting if that makes sense before core-updates.

What does everyone think? I think it is more a question of
timing/resources, either doing some ungrafting earlier but then having
more builds again soon after (e.g. glibc ungraft), or knocking some of
it out earlier with a smaller scope.

> To recall, the policy surrounding what goes to core-updates is still
> unchanged (per the Contributing section of our manual), except for areas
> covered by teams (which is still patchy at best -- have you considered
> joining teams?)
>

And thanks for pointing this out. I do hope we continue building teams
and scopes for them so core-updates doesn't end up getting too
unwieldy. I'm optimistic of a quicker merge timeline here as well, the
ungrafting being a nice immediate reason to do this.

> What do you think?  If you are interested in participating in the
> effort, you can send your ungrafting patches for review with the
> --subject-prefix='PATCH core-updates' prefix or if you are a committer
> you could simple version bumps to core tools that have been posted to
> guix-patches, if any.

Thanks Maxim for getting things rolling here!

John