Programatically syncing Git submodules and Guix packages

atlas-engineer / nyxt

Nyxt - the hacker's browser.

https://nyxt-browser.com/

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Programatically syncing Git submodules and Guix packages #2783

Open Ambrevar opened 1 year ago

Ambrevar commented 1 year ago

Follow up to https://github.com/atlas-engineer/nyxt/issues/2780#issuecomment-1424752997 👍

There is a draft of this in build-scripts/sync-submodules-with-guix.scm.

It won't work for all deps though since some Guix package don't use Git repos. But for the vast majority it does.

aadcg commented 1 year ago

After having done it manually in #3085, it may be hard to fully automatize the task. There are too many variable at stake.

I'd argue that it's not worth it. I did it in ~4 hours, but it should be noted that the last full sync was done quite a long time ago. Such a task should be made perhaps every major release, so I don't think it justifies yet the use of heavier machinery.

jmercouris commented 1 year ago

4 hours for every major release seems OK. My big question is why do we care at all about Guix? Why not just sync the submodules to their latest releases every major version?

aadcg commented 1 year ago

In short (suppressing some details):

Each CL library is unique - some require tracking tagged releases, others tracking master;
Guix is the only entity that can be qualified as a basis of truth since it captures all dependencies (not just CL ones).

Ambrevar commented 1 year ago

Other point:

Having the same deps for Guix and submodules dramatically improves reproducibility. Which is neat for testing and bug fixing.

Ambrevar commented 1 year ago

There are too many variable at stake.

True, but I did use the script once in the past and I believe that it did a big part of the job. So with a small fix, I believe it'd be able to shave off some 3/4 of the work, in other words, reduce the workload from 4 hours to 1.