State of the 'core-updates' branch

[Marius Bakke]

Hello Guix,

There has been a lot of activity on 'core-updates' recently.

Some highlights from this branch:

* The Full-Source Bootstrap
* GCC 11
* glibc 2.35
* Python 3.10.7
* OpenSSL 3.0
* Meson 0.63.2
* CMake 3.24.2
* Pytest 7.1.3
* bash-completion 2.11

As well as updates to the usual low-level libraries: GNU tools, Wayland,
ICU, Boost, the font stack, Mesa, Ghostscript, etc.

As of commit 28918b4ff8d2c297d1f1fb84eebdca9fc2dc9303, these work:

* GNOME
* IceCat
* Xfce
* Sway
* 'guix system vm'
* cross-compiling to various targets

These "almost" work:

* 'guix' needs this patch, and an update of the guix package:
  <https://issues.guix.gnu.org/57730#2>.  Can be worked around with this
  horrifying patch to the 'guix' package definition:

                    (add-after 'unpack 'adjust-for-glibc-2.34
                      (lambda _
                        (substitute* "guix/build/syscalls.scm"
                          (("#:library \"libutil\"")
                           ""))))

* Linux-Libre fails due to a regression in gawk, easy to work around by
  providing an older version; will be fixed with gawk 5.2.1.
* ungoogled-chromium needs a few tweaks
* libreoffice likewise
* diffoscope has one failing dependency
* there are segfaults from 'libgc' via Shepherd in a 'guix system vm'
  ... it still boots, but you probably should not reconfigure just yet!

These are currently failing:

* GCC 5
* glibc 2.33 (for old locales)

All in all, the branch is in great shape, and all my manifests are
building apart from the mentioned problems.

If there are any outstanding patches on the tracker, let's get them in.

I expect many Python packages need to be updated for 3.10.  To ease this
process it would be great to get the revamped build system from
'wip-python-pep517' merged.  I plan to look at it "soon", but volunteers
welcome.  :-)

Should we aim to "freeze" this branch by early/mid October or so?

-- 
Marius

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