Re: Ruby on Rails (web-application framework) (and the wip-rails branch)

[Ben Woodcroft]

Hi Chris,


On 31/01/18 05:50, Christopher Baines wrote:
> Hey,
>
> So I had a go at rebasing and using the wip-rails [1] branch recently,
> and I was very successful. One minor conflict needed resolving, a few
> extra packages, a few update and a few disabled test suites [2] and I
> was able to start a Rails app from scratch.
>
> 1: https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/log/?h=wip-rails
> 2: http://git.cbaines.net/guix/commit/?id=wip-rails
>
> I think it would be good to see these packages in the master branch, and
> would be up for trying to help towards this. Ben, do you have any
> thoughts on the wip-rails branch?

My main thought is thank you very much for digging this up. After we 
update the descriptions, synopses and lint each package, would you say 
that they are suitable for inclusion in master? It may be a good idea 
also to run an automated license checker to verify the copylefts.

The biggest issue I came across while creating the original package 
definitions was circular dependencies, AFAIR these issues were mainly 
solved by disabling tests in strategic packages. While I haven't tested 
this, my impression is that sometimes a packages was added to the 
wip-rails branch that did not end up being in the dependency graph of 
rails. If these packages are not useful in their own right e.g. if they 
are not maintained, then I think we should not bother to add them to 
Guix proper.

> One way of working on this would be to get commits in that branch ready
> to merge, either by just checking over the commits adding a single
> package, or pulling a package out of the big commit at the head of the
> branch [3]. Then once commits are ready, merge them in to master, and
> rebase the branch.
>
> 3: 
> https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/commit/?h=wip-rails&id=9a46eda7ee40f305692c4af8880eec4efc61102d
>
> Does anyone have any recommendations of methodologies to follow, or want
> to volunteer time to prepare and review commits?

My idea would be to write a generalised 'add-packages-to-git' Guile 
script which takes the current state of that branch, adds each package 
into git separately, and then uses the dependency graph to reorder the 
commits appropriately.

The commit message for adding a package is quite straightforward - I 
myself already use a little script to automate the process [0] for 
single packages.

I think that a script of this kind would be quite useful outside this 
effort too - WDYT?

ben


[0]: https://github.com/wwood/bbbin/blob/master/guix-add.rb