Subject: bug#39637: Policy to remove broken packages

From: Christopher Baines <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 22 Jun 2020 18:06:44 +0100

Jack Hill <[email-masked]> writes:

> On Sat, 20 Jun 2020, Christopher Baines wrote:
>
>> Do you have any examples of packages that are currently broken, and
>> which you'd like to remove?
>
> Perhaps mongo-tools: https://issues.guix.gnu.org/39637
>
> It broke when Go was upgraded to 1.13, and changed the test library. I
> fixed some other Go packages that ran into this issue, but it wasn't
> as easy for mongo-tools. Our version is old, so it should be
> updated. For various reasons, I don't see this package being fixed in
> the short term.

mongo-tools is definitely failing to build, and it has been since the
11th of Feb (2020) I think.

It seems like you got further in understanding this than I did. Given
that this seems like a test failure, and I don't think there's anything
to suggest that the actual functionality doesn't work, the course of
action I see here is to disable either the failing tests, or running the
test suite entirely.

I originally packaged MongoDB and mongo-tools for Guix, but that was
before the licence of MongoDB changed, so I'm not sure about the long
term future of the packages. Keeping the packages we have actually
building though is still useful.

Thanks,

Chris