Re: New “ungrafting” branch

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi,

Christopher Baines <mail@cbaines.net> skribis:

> 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.
>>
>> Thoughts?
>
> Sounds good. I'm not quite sure what you mean by safe though, it's
> definitely likely that things will behave the same, but it's not
> certain. Additionally, I guess there will be cases were things fail to
> build when the replacement is used in the build process.

My naïve thought was that ungrafting things would just work.  It’s not
quite the case: there were problems with Pango in particular that Marius
fixed.

> I thought the process used to be to push the update to
> staging/core-updates when the replacement was introduced to master?

In practice what happened is that we’d ungraft on these branches lazily.
However, these branches introduce other changes that require more work,
so the effect was that we’d end up carrying many grafts for a long time.

This very focused branch is an attempt to address that.  We’ll see if it
was a good idea once it’s finally merged.

Thanks,
Ludo’.