Re: Guix infrastructure

[Liam Wigney]

Hey all,

While I'm aware it was mentioned that server power was mentioned as an issue, 
OpenQA might be of interest for automatic testing. 

> On 9 Jul 2017, at 6:51 pm, Ricardo Wurmus <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> 
> Hi ng0,
> 
>> - master is not stable and it is not being treated as a high priority
>>  problem
> 
> I don’t know where you get this from and I don’t appreciate the
> insinuation that we don’t care.  The vast majority of commits to
> “master” are totally fine.
> 
> As we don’t have the resources for maintaining a stable branch, “master”
> is a best effort.
> 
>> - a bug in the compiler which is used in the core of Guix is bad.
> 
> We all agree here.  I don’t see the point of reiterating it.  The people
> who can fix it are already working on it — in their own time and in
> *addition* to all the things they regularly do.
> 
> Here’s a shout out to Ludo who tirelessly fixes old and new bugs,
> implements new features, improves performance, deals with GSoC, and
> answers community questions; to Andy Wingo who continuously improves
> Guile performance, implements new Guix services, drafted and implemented
> the potluck faster than I could blink, …; to Leo and Mark and Marius who
> keep on top of security issues despite the fact that this is no fun; —
> the list goes on and on.
> 
> Andy and Ludo are working on the Guile bug already.  I don’t see how
> this can reasonably result in complaints.
> 
>>  In my
>>  understanding that we could at least try to evade this by reducing the
>>  module sizes is met with arguments like "this will be fixed in the
>>  future, for now we can only split 1 module the rest has to stay
>>  together for semantic and linguistic reasons".
>>  If my understanding of the whole situation is wrong this is due to the
>>  intransparent dealing with this serious problem and the way my idea
>>  to temporarily fix it was met.
> 
> “Intransparent”?  I don’t know what else to say here.
> 
> Breaking up modules is *not* a fix, not even a temporary fix.  How would
> this help when Guile never frees memory and the cumulative usage ends up
> being the same?  This is something that needs to be fixed in Guile and
> both Andy and Ludo have already spent time to investigate this and come
> up with solutions.
> 
> I also wrote that splitting up (gnu packages python) is fine – yet I
> have not seen a patch that would do this.  There’s only so much a single
> person can do.
> 
> I’m skipping the rest of the complaints in this paragraph, because they
> add nothing new and ignore the late night efforts of people in the Guix
> and Guile communities.
> 
>> - Writing system services in Shepherd is hard.
> 
> I beg to differ.  If you have legitimate concerns please point out the
> sections in the manuals that are unclear and propose changes.
> 
>> These are the major issues Guix could fix.
> 
> “Guix” is people.
> 
> Personally, I don’t want to spend more time on this discussion, because
> I want to get back to getting things done that probably only few people
> will see or notice, but which need to be done anyway.
> 
> --
> Ricardo
> 
> GPG: BCA6 89B6 3655 3801 C3C6  2150 197A 5888 235F ACAC
> https://elephly.net
> 
>