Subject: bug#65391: People need to report failing builds even though we have ci.guix.gnu.org for that

From: Csepp <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 Aug 2023 01:45:04 +0200

Maxime Devos <[email-masked]> writes:

> [[PGP Signed Part:Undecided]]
> For example, naev used to work just fine, yet apparently it doesn't
> anymore: https://issues.guix.gnu.org/65390.
>
> Given that Guix has ci.guix.gnu.org, I would expect such new problems
> to be detected and resolved early, and it was detected by
> ci.guix.gnu.org, yet going by issues.guix.gnu.org it was never even
> investigated.
>
> (Yes, there is a delay, but that doesn't matter at all, as there's
> this dashboard <https://ci.guix.gnu.org/eval/668365/dashboard>.)
>
> Do people really need to report 33% of all jobs
> (https://ci.guix.gnu.org/eval/668365/dashboard) before those failures
> are taken seriously, instead of the ‘there don't seem to be that much
> more build failures from the core-updates/... merge, let's solve them
> later (i.e., never)’ that seems to be  status quo?
>
> Best regards,
> Maxime Devos
>
> [2. OpenPGP public key --- application/pgp-keys; OpenPGP_0x49E3EE22191725EE.asc]...
>
> [[End of PGP Signed Part]]

I tried signing up to the CI mailing list and it immediately became
overwhelming.
Also the CI UI could use some improvements.  I'm pretty sure I've
mentioned this before, but there is no easy way to find out which inputs
I need to fix to make a dependency failure disappear.  I think everyone
has better things to do than perform a linear search by hand.
So I rely on my own installations for detecting errors, that way I at
least know that I don't get flooded with notifications for packages I
know nothing about.
One possible improvement I have been thinking about is making it easy
for users to filter CI output to the packages in their profile closure,
so for example they would get advance notice of any broken packages
*before* attempting to install them.
Teams could also have their own filters.