Re: New “ungrafting” branch

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi,

Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name> skribis:

> On Fri, Jan 15, 2021 at 12:57:50AM -0500, Mark H Weaver wrote:
>> Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> writes:
>> 
>> > Following discussions on IRC, I’ve created a new ‘ungrafting’ branch
>> > that does nothing but ungraft things.
>> >
>> > The rationale is that grafts incur additional overhead when installing
>> > things (the time to create those grafts), so it’s good to clean them up
>> > once in a while.  Ungrafting in a dedicated branch means we know the
>> > branch is “safe”, unlike more exploratory branches like ‘staging’ and
>> > ‘core-updates’.
>> >
>> > The plan is to start building it later today, and to hopefully be done
>> > in a week or so.
>> 
>> This is a good initiative, but it seems to have stalled.  Is there a
>> reason that it has not yet been merged into 'master'?
>
> The ungrafting branch was merged into the staging branch. Unfortunately,
> the staging branch is moving very slowly. I perceive a lack of
> interest in working on it :/

Apologies for not contributing so far, this month is busy for me.  I
think the slow feedback loop with ci.guix is one of the main reasons
people don’t contribute much.  Perhaps the whole process is also unclear
to people who’re not seasoned contributors?

> I think that the ungrafting branch should have been kept separate and
> merged into master quickly.

Yes, that was the goal, but again, ci.guix got in the way by not
providing quick feedback.  Then there were holidays, and then I was busy
with other things, as I guess is the case with the other people who
previously looked into it.

My assumption was that an ungrafting branch would be easy to handle:
trivial changes, no breakage.  But it’s not that simple: we met actual
breakage (Marius fixed non-trivial things), and again, the feedback loop
was too slow.

Ludo’.