Attached is a first stab at fixing this. There are additional options to 
guix-daemons now:

       --cache-failures       cache build failures
       --cache-hook-failures  cache build failures due to hook failures 
(depends
                              on cache-failures)
       --cache-timeout-failures   cache build failures due to timeouts 
(depends
                              on cache-failures)

Patch compiles, but is yet untested since the system I need it has gone 
away for the time being..

Flo

On 12/02/2015 11:03 PM, Florian Paul Schmidt wrote:
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> Hi,
>
> on my system bulding the derivation for the package tbb (version
> 4.3.2) does not complete due to exceeding the max-silent-time default
> value of 3600 seconds (one hour).
>
> It seems that in this case the path is not marked as failed in the
> sqlite3 db
>
> /var/guix/db/db.sqlite
>
> in the table FailedPaths. This is quite annoying since it seems that
> several packages depend on it causing the derivation to be built
> several times (each taking over an hour to fail).
>
> The guix daemon is running with the --cache-failures option and I
> would expect the second run of
>
> for n in `guix package -A | cut -f1`; do guix build --no-substitutes
> "$n" || true; done
>
> to be mostly a NOOP, since all failures from the first run should be
> cached. And even in the first run I wouldn't expect failed
> dependencies to be tried to build again. Contrary to this on this box
> even the second run of this takes about half a day or so to complete ;)
>
> Flo
>
> P.S.: FYI: The thing that takes over an hour to run is
>
> ./test_atomic.exe
>
>
> - -- 
> https://fps.io
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