Subject: bug#70456: Status of ‘core-updates’

From: Christopher Baines <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 20 Apr 2024 12:14:33 +0100

Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]> writes:

> What’s the status of ‘core-updates’?  What are the areas where help is
> needed?
>
> I know a lot has happened since the last update¹, which is roughly when
> I dropped the ball due to other commitments, but I’m not sure where we
> are now.

I haven't really been following core-updates, but I have had a look
since there's a request to merge it now [1].

I'm really concerned by the commits on the branch though, assuming I'm
using Git right, there are 6351 commits on the branch:

  git log --pretty=oneline core-updates ^master | wc -l

Somehow, I think there's been a couple of pushes of commits to
core-updates that have partially duplicated lots of commits from master,
I put some more details in:

  https://issues.guix.gnu.org/70456#3

I think keeping the Git commit history clean and representative is
really important, so to me at least this means core-updates can't be
merged to master in it's current form, even if the changes overall from
these 6351 commits are reasonable.

I'm really not sure how to move forward though, I had a go at trying to
rebuild the branch without introducing the thousands of duplicate
commits and that produced a branch with 765 commits over master, which
still seems a lot, but a big improvement over 6351:

  https://git.cbaines.net/guix/log/?h=chris-core-updates-no-duplicates-attempt

That was really hard going though, as there's plenty of merge conflicts
along the way, and I'm pretty sure I solved some of them
incorrectly. The resulting branch also differs from core-updates.

Maybe someone with more time, care and attention could do a better job,
but it might be more worthwhile just starting fresh and rather than
trying to produce a like for like branch just without the thousands of
duplicate commits, effectively manually rebase the branch (without the
duplicate commits) on master and try to get the commits in to a usable
state.

Any ideas?

Thanks,

Chris