Re: Branch (and team?) for mesa updates

[John Kehayias]

Hello again,

On Mon, Jun 19, 2023 at 02:10 PM, John Kehayias wrote:

> Hi everyone,
>
> With our move to a branching strategy for patches that require many
> rebuilds, I would like to propose a branch for Mesa updates. Based on
> how Mesa has been developed the last few years, there should be
> frequent (roughly a couple of months or quicker) releases that
> shouldn't be breaking anything or requiring lots of packaging work.
>
> Famous last words, I know, but at least in the last few years the only
> big change I know of was the one we hit on the last core-updates cycle
> with old hardware being dropped. The previous cycle had some build
> changes, perhaps due to missing many intermediate version changes.
> Both were rather self-contained and resolved quickly.
>
> So, I have submitted a patch for the latest stable release at
> <https://issues.guix.gnu.org/64175> I'm aware of one other patch that
> should also go here, <https://issues.guix.gnu.org/64044> are there any
> others?
>

I've created a "mesa-updates" branch with these two commits (the one
updating mesa has been updated to the latest version from last week).

> I've tentatively labeled with "mesa-updates" as a proposed branch
> name. With Mesa's release cycle I propose keeping this as a branch for
> Mesa updates, and I suppose related required changes (say libdrm). If
> everything goes smoothly, we can give the build farm some time to
> build everything, check for any breakages, and then push to master
> with substitutes available. Master can be merged into this branch just
> prior to a patches going to this branch with the expectation merging
> back to master will be soon after and changes are only affecting
> packages that won't be touched on master anyway. I think this should
> be relatively clean and straightforward, a good use of our new
> branching/building strategy.
>
> Thoughts? Can someone set up a build job for this branch and/or let me
> know how to do that? (I would also require access to Cuirass.)
>

I'll open a branch merge request issue later today as per new
procedure for QA. Though I believe that only builds 2 branches, which
is occupied at the moment. Or can someone set a separate build job
specifically for mesa-updates, especially if we think it is a good
idea to have this going forward?

> Do we want a "Mesa team" or something a bit larger? Not sure what
> exactly, since "graphics" is perhaps too broad. Happy to help
> spearhead the Mesa front for Guix (the very package that got me first
> involved in the patching process).
>

This is still a good question I think, of how we want to have a
team(s) to handle things like xorg, wayland, mesa, and related
packages. They are a bit all over the place in terms of scope and what
they touch. For now I'd like to go ahead with a regular mesa-updates
branch since that sees regular releases and is pretty self-contained
currently.

Thanks!
John