Re: Core-updates merge

[John Kehayias]

Dear Andreas and fellow Guix-ers,

On Tue, Apr 25, 2023 at 04:09 PM, Andreas Enge wrote:

> Hello all,
>
> I have just merged core-updates into master and deleted the branch!
> This has been a long adventure, which became particularly intensive
> after the last Guix Days in February. First and foremost many thanks to
> everyone who contributed to the branch, be it by commits, discussions or
> by working on the infrastructure.
>

As others have said, a big thank you to you once again for leading the
charge! Much appreciated!

> Each and every package is not yet in shape; please feel free to submit
> patches for your favourite packages that fail to build. In particular:
> - python-yubikey-manager does not build currently; work to correct this
>   is underway.

I've just submitted <https://issues.guix.gnu.org/63139> which does a bit
more than just fix that package and would be good for a Python feature
branch. I'll send the cover letter to this list for wider visibility,
though the Python team was cc'ed on the series. I suppose I should add
myself to the team after this.

> - R on powerpc does not build; this will also be corrected soon;
> - aarch64 has very few substitutes; I think this is mainly due to the build
>   farm catching up and not so much to packages not building, but this is
>   difficult to know.
> If any of these are essential to you, you may wish to wait a little bit
> longer before a "guix pull", or for the time being pull to a commit just
> before the merge by issuing
>    guix pull --commit=472706ae2f9160833951a4e4bcc4c206e03097b0
>
> Every end of a story is the beginning of many new ones. Several areas of
> work have already been identified; I will summarise what came up on the
> mailing list and who expressed interest to work on it - please feel free
> to join if a topic interests you, or launch another initiative if you
> want to work on a different subject!
> - rust-team already has a branch that is almost ready to be built and
>   merged, as a precursor to the team based workflow that we need to invent
>   (Efraim Flashner).
> - R on powerpc64le needs to be built by changes to valgrind and lz4
>   (Simon Tournier, I).
> - Many Python packages need updates, in particular with the aim of building
>   python-yubikey-manager (John Kehayias, Lars-Dominik Braun, Brian Cully).

I'll have to see what other patches we want to add to my series for
the branch and creating/building that as soon as possible. There is
some feedback needed on the deeper changes in my patch series, but
hopefully won't take much to finalize.

> - There is still work to do to bootstrap GHC until the latest version on
>   i686, and to potentially shorten the bootstrap chain (Lars-Dominik Braun).
> - OCaml could be simplified by dropping version 4.07 (Julien Lepiller).
> - After the mesa update is before the mesa update, and it looks like more
>   features can be enabled (Kaelyn Takata, John Kehayias).

When I get a chance next I'll be pulling the relevant patches locally
and building as a first check. And then we'll want this feature branch
to be created and built for wider testing.

> - Too much in Guix depends on too much else, which makes building things
>   needlessly entangled; in particular time zone data should not be referred
>   to by packages, but be loaded at runtime (Leo Famulari).
>
> All the best in your Guix endeavours,
>
> Andreas

Thanks everyone!
John