Hello all, just a quick message to let you know that I will be AFK from this Saturday on for close to two weeks. So I will not look at the team branches during that time. Please go ahead and merge your branches yourself when they are ready; then inform the team of the next branch to rebase and so on. The order of branches is recorded here: https://qa.guix.gnu.org/
That I feel the need to write this message is a bit worrying; it means I have become a bottleneck, which is neither good for the project nor healthy for me. Quite some time ago now (almost a year?) I volunteered to look after the branches, and it is work that I feel is useful and that I do enjoy. But still we had better move on, and it would be nice to find a successor, or better yet, find a successor team, or maybe even some form of self-organisation between the teams. Having someone look after the branches is useful as a neutral instance to mediate between teams (which might never be ready for merging since there is always one more commit to put on a branch!), and to also assure a quick succession of branches (the person who merges one branch to master can immediately rebase the next branch in line). But really, it should be possible to organise this collectively, with our consensus based spirit, and come up with a process (using a GCD? someone else would have to write it ;-)). Some bottlenecks remain. Having written the software, Chris is the person who knows all the little details of the bordeaux build farm. And I know a little from discussing with him; actually everything I could achieve was because Chris solved occurring problems in the background, thanks a lot for his tireless help! I also have the advantage of being one of the few people with root access to the machines, to restart a service here and there, which made me well suited for the role of branch manager. But I think we need a more sustainable approach for the future concerning our infrastructure as well. I would like to step down from the branch manager role mid-May, which does not mean I will not be available for discussions and help and work on branches after that, but I would not be responsible anymore for getting branches merged in a timely fashion. Anyway, I am looking forward to a bit of vacation :) Andreas
