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

From: "Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2023 12:39:09 +0200

Maxim Cournoyer <[email-masked]> writes:
> Believe it or not, I actually did! :-) I was replying to the first part
> of your message, where you mentioned you were against packages removal.
> My reply was giving support to devising policy that would define when
> it's acceptable to prune the distribution of broken/unmaintained
> packages, which is tangentially related to the topic of reporting broken
> packages.

Please don’t remove packages that are broken on the CI. I often had a
case where no substitute was available but the package built just fine
locally. This is not a perfect situation (nicer would be to track why it
doesn’t come from CI — sometimes it’s just a resource problem on the
CI), but if you removed a package I use that would break all updates for
me.

I had that in the past. It’s not a nice situation, because it not only
break that one package but also prevents getting security updates until
you find time to inspect what exactly is broken.

And if you depend on that package, stuff stops working. Example: The
changes to the Texlive packages currently break the PDF export of many
pages for me — I have not found the deeper reason yet. And I usually
cannot investigate such problems right-away, because I can’t just drop
everything for hobby automation that should just keep working.

If a change in packages breaks my manifest, that is extremely painful.

Best wishes,
Arne
-- 
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heißt politisch sein,
ohne es zu merken.
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