Re: [PATCH] Add rubygems updater.

[Ben Woodcroft]

On 01/01/16 19:28, Pjotr Prins wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 01, 2016 at 06:27:21PM +1000, Ben Woodcroft wrote:
> > It seems there's 30 packages to be updated, out of the 107 in
> > ruby.scm. Going through each of these individually seems a little
> > tedious, can we do them in bulk somehow or do they have to be
> > committed individually? Building and testing all packages that
> > require these packages would be a start - is there any way to list
> > all dependent packages?
> >
> > gnu/packages/ruby.scm:2807:13: ruby-cutest would be upgraded from
> > 1.2.2 to 1.2.3
> > gnu/packages/ruby.scm:333:13: ruby-rspec-mocks would be upgraded
> > from 3.2.1 to 3.4.0
> (etc)
>
> I don't think it is a good idea to automatically update
> packages. Reason being that packages should be updated by someone who
> is actively using that new version. Automated tests are one thing,
> real user feedback another. Not to mention that many gems don't have
> tests ;).
I think we should update the package definitions so that more have 
tests, and failing that import the library so we know it can at least be 
loaded, like this:

+     `(#:phases
+       (modify-phases %standard-phases
+         (replace 'check
+           (lambda _
+             (zero? (system* "ruby" "-Ilib" "-r" "ansi")))))))

I would prefer to do this testing in an environment where only the propagated 
inputs are loaded, but I'm not sure how to do this. But I digress.

Do you think it would be a good idea to provide a "bleeding edge" repository so 
that users can more easily help with testing? Perhaps also a branch that only updates 
according to semantic versioning?


> What is useful is to generate (export) an updated package using the
> old one as an input. Or show a diff of version + SHA. That way it
> becomes reasonably easy to update packages.
I'm not sure what you mean. guix refresh has the --update flag, which 
updates the version and source SHA hash in the source code - useful.

Thanks,
ben