Subject: Re: Request for merging "core-updates" branch

From: Christopher Baines <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 22 Jun 2024 20:33:59 +0100

Hey,

I've spent a bunch of time in the last few days trying to see if I can
get the bordeaux build farm moving on core-updates and I think things
are moving at pace now.

Builds are happening for 6 systems, with the only major omission being
i586-gnu, I think there are existing issues with the guix-daemon in the
childhurds not being able to stop builds which timeout, which leads to
them getting stuck on builds. I'm not sure if there's an open bug about
this.

The other major issue that comes up every time there's a core-updates
round is that the x86_64-linux bootstrap doesn't seem to build on btrfs,
or at least milano-guix-1 which uses btrfs. I have to work around this
by scheduling builds with --tag=filesystem=ext4 to have them run on
other machines. There isn't a good bug for this, but #53416 probably
applies.

data.qa.guix.gnu.org seemed to be timing out more than usual for both
patches and branches, so I've made some changes there and in the
qa-frontpage to mitigate that. The core-updates page should now always
load, although something needs adding so you can see how up to date the
data is.

1: https://qa.guix.gnu.org/branch/core-updates

Andreas has also been getting some additional x86_64-linux/i686-linux
agents up and running which should help to speed up the build
throughput.

Chris