Re: Poetry upgrade and related packages

[Marius Bakke]

Tanguy LE CARROUR <tanguy@bioneland.org> skriver:

> Hi,
>
>
> Excerpts from Ludovic Courtès's message of December 5, 2020 4:44 pm:
>> Tanguy LE CARROUR <tanguy@bioneland.org> skribis:
>> 
>>> It's not yet clear to me how to handle (python) package updates:
>>> - when to update;
>>> - when not to update;
>>> - when to introduce "versionned" (`-x.y` suffix) package definitions;
>>> - when to introduce "next" (`/next` suffix) package definitions;
>>> - when to remove the two above suffixes;
>>> - …
>>>
>>> So I'm looking forward to reading the answers to this thread! :-)
>> 
>> When a change introduces too many rebuilds, the convention is to make
>> that change on a branch that will be merged “later” rather than on
>> ‘master’; this is bullet 8 here:
>> 
>>   https://guix.gnu.org/manual/devel/en/html_node/Submitting-Patches.html
>
> Thanks for pointing at, but this "just" tells me on which branch to put
> the changeset, not which of the above options should be used when a
> package needs to be updated.

There is no "one size fits all" rule.  With rare exceptions, Guix
"wants" to have only have a single version of each package (mainly to
ease maintenance).  As you found, that's not always feasible.

If a package depends on a newer version of something "deep in the graph"
such as Pytest, it's always OK to add a "/next" or "-x.y" variant
(though a convention about which to use would probably be a good idea).

If something depends on a *specific* (older) version of Pytest, it's
better to try and make it work with the newer version; but failing that,
adding a "-x.y" is fine too.

Then there are ecosystems such as Go and Rust that have fairly strict
semver rules, and require carrying many different versions of the same
package.

>> Yet, sometimes we want to introduce new versions that people can get in
>> their profile, even if the “default” one remains the older version to
>> avoid world rebuilds.
>
> That's exactly my point! If the default one lags behind, then after some
> time, nobody will use it any more and we will have introduced one or more
> `-x.y` package definitions!
> I would consider it to be a "saner" approach to have the default always
> "point" to the latest version, but then we would have to "fix" package
> depending on older versions by introducing `-x.y` package definitions
> for them.
>
> Or am I missing something?!

You got it right.  It might be saner to make the unversioned variable
refer to the newest version, but it would often require "pinning"
hundreds of packages to the old version to avoid rebuilds.  Thus, it's
typically more practical to use the "/next" variant until the next
rebuild cycle.

Again there is no hard rule here, I did such a change for 'libcap' in
9e1f5a263e4f6df4d075901c9b58a56f80c8b452 because only two packages
needed to pin the old version.

>> One example is GDB: gdb@8 has 1,671 dependents, but we added gdb@10 on
>> the side such that “guix install gdb” gives you version 10.
>
> The difference here is that it's a package added to a profile, not a
> dependency, so `gdb` means the latest available version of GDB, right?
>
> As you can see, everything is not yet clear to me! Sorry! ^_^'

Hope this clears things up a little more.  :-)

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