Hello Guix!
Will Guix’s 10th year be a release year? I hope so!
We need to plan and coordinate. Releases have to be a group effort;
some of the most important work won’t be coding but coordination.
Coordination is key. I don’t think I should be spearheading that
effort, but I’m happy to be part of it.
Who’s ready to commit time towards that goal for the coming weeks?
Here’s a list of things to do to get there:
• Merge ‘staging’ (?). What’s the status of that one, it seemed ready
a couple of weeks ago, but then I lost track of it. Marius?
We need a ‘staging’ champion to keep track of what’s left to be
done, reports progress, pings people, etc. That person does not
have to be hacking like crazy, on the contrary!
• Get base binaries on all supported architectures in a timely
fashion, or drop some of the architectures.
Namely, ‘make assert-binaries-available’ is currently failing. It
uses a manifest that encodes what we consider to be the basic
requirements for each architecture; it’s not demanding for
aarch64-linux, even less for armhf-linux and i586-gnu—yet we’re not
meeting these criteria yet.
We need to look at missing substitutes, address build issues and
build farm issues that cause them until we get to zero failures. If
after some effort we fail to get to zero, then we should consider
dropping architectures (I’m looking at armhf-linux and i586-gnu
specifically).
Again we need a champion to keep track of this and ping people so we
make progress!
• Address the blockers of <https://issues.guix.gnu.org/53214>, most of
which are issues in the installer.
• Freeze strings: enter a period where translatable strings in the
code and in the manual must not be changed so translators have a
chance to keep up. Julien, how would you like to do that? Weblate
has given us more flexibility it seems.
• Publish a release candidate and call for testing of the installer in
particular. Fix bugs, loop.
• Update NEWS (mostly done already!), prepare a blog post listing the
highlights and linking to the relevant material. (See
<https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/tags/releases/> for inspiration.)
I’d like us to do this with an eye of getting better organized, which
involves defining roles such as that of “release managers”.
The NixOS folks handle this in a way that I find inspiring, with
rotating release manager responsibilities, a schedule announced upfront,
and a detailed description of the process:
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/193585
https://nixos.github.io/release-wiki/Home.html
We have
<https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix/maintenance.git/tree/doc/release.org>
but it’s low-level and dates back to a time where release were a
one-person activity. Time for a change.
So, who’s in? Let’s get our act together!
Ludo’.