22.11.2 Managing Patches and Branches

Changes should be posted to guix-patches@gnu.org. This mailing list fills the patch-tracking database (see The Issue Tracker). It also allows patches to be picked up and tested by the quality assurance tooling; the result of that testing eventually shows up on the dashboard at ‘https://qa.guix.gnu.org/issue/ISSUE_NUMBER’, where ISSUE_NUMBER is the number assigned by the issue tracker. Leave time for a review, without committing anything.

As an exception, some changes considered “trivial” or “obvious” may be pushed directly to the master branch. This includes changes to fix typos and reverting commits that caused immediate problems. This is subject to being adjusted, allowing individuals to commit directly on non-controversial changes on parts they’re familiar with.

Changes which affect more than 300 dependent packages (see Invoking guix refresh) should first be pushed to a topic branch other than master; the set of changes should be consistent—e.g., “GNOME update”, “NumPy update”, etc. This allows for testing: the branch will automatically show up at ‘https://qa.guix.gnu.org/branch/branch’, with an indication of its build status on various platforms.

To help coordinate the merging of branches, you must create a new guix-patches issue each time you wish to merge a branch (see The Issue Tracker). The title of the issue requesting to merge a branch should have the following format:

Request for merging "name" branch

The QA infrastructure recognizes such issues and lists the merge requests on its main page. Normally branches will be merged in a “first come, first merged” manner, tracked through the guix-patches issues.

If you agree on a different order with those involved, you can track this by updating which issues block⁴⁵ which other issues. Therefore, to know which branch is at the front of the queue, look for the oldest issue, or the issue that isn’t blocked by any other branch merges. An ordered list of branches with the open issues is available at https://qa.guix.gnu.org.

Once a branch is at the front of the queue, wait until sufficient time has passed for the build farms to have processed the changes, and for the necessary testing to have happened. For example, you can check ‘https://qa.guix.gnu.org/branch/branch’ to see information on some builds and substitute availability.