Re: Repology and outdated packages

[kiasoc5]

June 8, 2022 at 9:38 PM, "Ludovic Courtès" <ludo@gnu.org 
mailto:ludo@gnu.org?to=%22Ludovic%20Court%C3%A8s%22%20%3Cludo%40gnu.org%3E > 
wrote:

> Guix is *potentially* even more up-to-date than NixOS thanks to
> ‘--with-latest’ and ‘--with-branch’! \o/

I do use --with-latest for testing package upgrades. But it is tedious to type

$ guix build X --with-latest=X

in order to test the latest package.

What would be nice is if

$ guix build --latest X

is an equivalent command. Certainly a shell script could take care of that:

guix-build-with-latest() {
    guix build "$1" --with-latest="$1"
}

but having it done in guix itself would be convenient.

> Seriously though, we could take better advantage of the tooling that we
> have: ‘guix refresh’, ‘guix graph’, and the corresponding APIs. With
> that, we can write code that automatically tries out package updates and
> prepares patches, for instance. We could even largely automate “update
> trains” (what we’re doing with master/staging/core-updates).

It could be an option to guix refresh, for example

$ guix build --latest X --export-patch

would build X with the latest version and export a patch with an appropriate 
commit message (like marking failed builds with DRAFT). This would help users 
contribute without having to clone the git repo.