What's the relationship between wip and pkgsrc branches?

[Ottavio Caruso]

Hello,

I would like to start playing with pkgsrc-wip, although there are a
couple of questions that puzzle me.

For example, my understanding is that the release of a new pkgsrc-wip
snapshot is not necessarily synced to a -current release and obviously
not a to a quarterly release.

Is therefore pkgsrc-wip branch-independent, or, due to its inherently
unstable and volatile nature, does it assume that you are using the
current branch?

Would pkgsrc-wip work or make sense also with a stable quarterly release?

Or have I just missed the point?

[Thomas Klausner]

Post by Ottavio Caruso
Is therefore pkgsrc-wip branch-independent, or, due to its inherently
unstable and volatile nature, does it assume that you are using the
current branch?

Generally, you should use pkgsrc-wip with pkgsrc current.
Thomas

[Jonathan Perkin]

Post by Ottavio Caruso
Is therefore pkgsrc-wip branch-independent, or, due to its
inherently unstable and volatile nature, does it assume that you are
using the current branch?

It works reasonably well on older branches, we make quite heavy use of
it back to 2012Q4.

For any packages which no longer work correctly or for where we need
to make changes, we have pkgsrc-joyent.

Post by Ottavio Caruso
Would pkgsrc-wip work or make sense also with a stable quarterly release?

This is something we'd like to see, but it would be additional work
that I don't think anyone has the appetite for so I think it is
unlikely to happen. Besides, any spare cycles for wip would be better
served improving and integrating the packages into pkgsrc proper.

[Greg Troxel]

Ottavio Caruso <ottavio2006-***@yahoo.com> writes:

[I dropped pkgsrc-users, following the avoid-crossposting theory.]

Post by Ottavio Caruso
For example, my understanding is that the release of a new pkgsrc-wip
snapshot is not necessarily synced to a -current release and obviously
not a to a quarterly release.

I don't think "pkgsrc-wip snapshot" refers to anything meaningful. It's
in CVS, and we don't use branches. So there is just the latest.

Post by Ottavio Caruso
Is therefore pkgsrc-wip branch-independent, or, due to its inherently
unstable and volatile nature, does it assume that you are using the
current branch?

That gives us credit for having more software process documentation that
we do. Really, people commit to wip what they think are improvements.
Most of those people probably have their pkgsrc trees at -current. Some
of them migth be using the last quarterly branch. I would say that the
norm is that pkgsrc-wip -current should work with pkgsrc-current, and if
not wip is buggy.

Post by Ottavio Caruso
Would pkgsrc-wip work or make sense also with a stable quarterly release?

As Jonathan says, I think effort would be better spent fixing up pkgsrc
proper and migrating. Generally pkgsrc-wip has packages that aren't
really quite ok anyway, or have some other reason not to be in pkgsrc
proper, or it's just that no one has gotten around to it.

If you wanted to set up bulk builds of wip and post the results, that
would be a big step forward. I suspect a lot doesn't build. These
reports could help to show what's ready.

[Jonathan Perkin]

Post by Greg Troxel
If you wanted to set up bulk builds of wip and post the results, that
would be a big step forward. I suspect a lot doesn't build. These
reports could help to show what's ready.

This is actually reasonably tricky, the last time I attempted this the
problem was that so many packages are fundamentally broken you can't
start the bulk build.

It may have improved since then, and I'm sure there are things we can
do to help (e.g. set ignore_missing_dependencies=yes), but it was
enough to stop me from finishing the experiment. It's on my TODO list
to get it working at some point, probably integrating with the regular
upstream builds.

[Greg Troxel]

Post by Jonathan Perkin

Post by Greg Troxel
If you wanted to set up bulk builds of wip and post the results, that
would be a big step forward. I suspect a lot doesn't build. These
reports could help to show what's ready.

This is actually reasonably tricky, the last time I attempted this the
problem was that so many packages are fundamentally broken you can't
start the bulk build.

Perhaps there's some way to run some sort of "make show-depends" or
something in each, and skip any that are really broken. Ideally pbulk
would gracefully skip things that error out.