[arch-dev-public] Todos for language specific rebuilds

[Jelle van der Waa]

On 01/11/20 at 09:04am, Anatol Pomozov via arch-dev-public wrote:
> Hello
> 
> On Sat, Jan 11, 2020 at 6:58 AM Dave Reisner <d at falconindy.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Fri, Jan 10, 2020, 16:43 Christian Rebischke via arch-dev-public <
> > arch-dev-public at archlinux.org> wrote:
> >
> > > Hi everybody,
> > >
> > > I would like to propose that we create todos for rebuilds of language
> > > specific packages.
> > >
> > > We had two major rebuilds in the last months: python3.8 and ruby2.7.
> > >
> > > Can we agree that we create a todo before such rebuilds?
> > > The advantages outweigh the disadvantages. We would gain:
> > >
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > I'm not sure I understand. Can you clearly state the problems we've
> > encountered due to not doing this? What downsides do you see to your
> > proposal? Can you think of any alternative solutions?
> >
> > * More people help rebuilding the packages.
> > >
> >
> > Solving the wrong problem, IMO. This is largely toil and should be
> > automated away.
> 
> I agree with every statement that Dave made. Especially with this one.

Yes, we should make this rebuilder official in some way and properly
document it so multiple people can use it.

Some languages however require special treatment such as Haskell and
require rebuilds from GHC => Haskell-foo => Haskell-bar etc which can
become complicated. For example if I want to update a dependency of
taskell I will have to rebuild all depending programs/libs so tooling
which makes that easier is welcome to me. I know Felix has some stuff
but we should make this more visible.

I would propose to document how to rebuild a library/program on the
Package Guidelines pages which I plan to do for Haskell after talking
with Felix.

> We need to automate as much our daily routine as possible. Scripting/automation
> is the only way to keep the increasing complexity of the system under control.

Yes!

> > As a maintainer, I don't care that you're rebuilding my package to keep up
> > with library changes. Rather, I'm thankful to whomever did this for me.
> >
> > Why would a language rebuild differ from any other soname bump?

For Haskell this is the case, but I am not sure if this is unique.

> > * Maintainers have the possibility to test the packages.
> 
> Did you have any problems with testing the recent language rebuilds?

We have never tested anything in [staging] where rebuilds happen since
that's not possible at all since it's always half broken. Testing
happens in [testing].

-- 
Jelle van der Waa
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