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

From: 宋文武 <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2023 18:29:00 +0800

Maxime Devos <[email-masked]> writes:

>> Maybe we can automatically report the failures as bugs, say every 7
>> days, and remove a package if it still fail to build in 90 days?
>
> The first part looks reasonable to me (though I would decrease 7 days
> to daily or even hourly, as I don't see a point in the delay), but how
> does the second part (removing packages) make sense at all?
>

Oh, to be more clear I didn't mean automatically remove a package, but
notify guix-devel to consider removing one if its "fail to build" issue
had existed for a long time and no one care.

> [...]
>
> Instead, what about:
>
>> Maybe we can automatically report the failures as bugs, say every
>> hour, and revert the commit(s) causing the new build failures if they
>> haven't been fixed in a week.

Yes, automatically report bugs would be helpful.  And I'll leave the
reverting rights to committers, which usually need some research and
maybe risky.

> [...]
> Expanding upon this a bit more:
>
>    * Expecting that people fix build failures of X when updating X seems
>      reasonable to me, and I think this is not in dispute.
>
>    * Expecting that people using X fix build failures of X or risk the
>      package X being deleted when someone else changed a dependency Y of
>      X seems unreasonable to me.   More generally, I am categorically
>      opposed to:
>
>      ‘If you change something and it breaks something else, you should
>      leave fixing the something else to someone (unless you want to
>      fix it yourself).’
>
>      (I can think of some situations where this is a good thing, but not
>      in general and in particular not in this Guix situation.)
>
>      I mean, I don't know about you, but for me it fails the categorical
>      imperative and the so-called Golden Rule.

I agree.  Well sometimes if breaks are overlooked by me, then it's very
welcome for other to give me a hand.

Thanks.