Re: GNOME Modulesets migrating to BuildStream

[Christian Hergert <christian hergert me>]

On 11/09/2017 03:20 AM, Tristan Van Berkom wrote:
> .
>
> This cut off wont happen in 2017, but will happen before the release of
> GNOME 3.28 stable. From now on, we will be creating the development
> releases using BuildStream.

I'm all for seeing the BuildStream conversion happen. But I do have some 
concerns regarding the timeline.

Many of us have been pushing hard to improve developer workflow. It 
appears that BuildStream will, very soon, be a great tool in that endeavor.

However, many of us plan our cycles before the cycle starts so that we 
ensure we have time to implement features without burning out. We're 
already two months into the 3.28 cycle and not far away from the 
beginning of freezes. Doubly so when you take into account winter holidays.

This change will undoubtedly affect those of us working on tooling, 
newcomer documentation, and worflow. So I'm somewhat concerned that I'm 
having, what appears to be, a large amount of work dropped on my plate 
mid-cycle if Builder is to not degrade in usefulness for GNOME developers.

How can we ensure that this change happens without breaking Builder 
users using the jhbuild runtime?

If I somehow miraculously find time to both learn BuildStream and 
automate it in Builder's nightly builds, that still means we have to get 
people using Nightly instead of the stable release. That sort of ties my 
hands in terms of stability in git master, but in the realm of possibility.

Change of this magnitude is a lot of work and we all value the amount of 
effort you're putting into this.

Cheers,

-- Christian