I've been looking at hydra.gnu.org a bit at some of the failing packages to
see what is causing them to fail. This list is far from complete, and is
based on eval #107275 on hydra.


bwa:
fails on non-x86_64 targets.
This package is part of bioinformatics.scm so it may not be intended for
non-x86_64 targets.

chicken:
guix refresh -l chicken: no dependant packages.
Has not built successfully since early May.
x86_64: http://hydra.gnu.org/build/701776/nixlog/1 (~1900 lines) runtime tests
timed out
armhf: http://hydra.gnu.org/build/701673/nixlog/1 (~4300 lines) tests pass
(including runtime tests) until ports test
Error: (line 294) invalid escape-sequence '\x o' => Embedded NUL bytes in
filenames are rejected.
mips64el: http://hydra.gnu.org/build/699177/nixlog/1 same as arm
i686: http://hydra.gnu.org/build/698575/nixlog/1 same as x86_64

diamond:
fails on non-x86_64 targets.
This package is part of bioinformatics.scm so it may not be intended for
non-x86_64 targets.

eigen:
fails on non-x86_64 targets.
As per their website http://eigen.tuxfamily.org/index.php?title=Main_Page
this package may need special attention for compile flags for non-x86 targets.

fastcap:
fails on all hardware targets.
has not built successfully since August 1st. 

gnurl:
fails on all targets.
test 46 fails. updating to 7.40.0 also fails at test 46. 7.43.0 is missing
install.sh, so it doesn't build. currently waiting on 7.44.0 from gnunet.

gprolog:
armhf: configure: error: unsupported architecture

guile-ncurses:
guix refresh -l guile-ncurses: no dependant packages
The first failure was after ncurses was updated from 5.9 to 6.0. Currently I
don't see ncurses 5.9 when I search in guix, so we're left with either
waiting for guile-ncurses 2.7 to be released or reimplementing ncurses 5.9 if
we want it now.

ibus-libpinyin:
fails on all targets with the following error during the configure phase:
configure.ac:130: warning: macro 'AM_GLIB_GNU_GETTEXT' not found in library
autoreconf:
running: /gnu/store/7zdchnk3sl66wqf2a7pis7ahwf4f1dr1-autoconf-2.69/bin/autoconf
--force configure.ac:130: error: possibly undefined macro: AM_GLIB_GNU_GETTEXT
I leave it as an exercise to the audience to figure out what's missing :)

opam:
fails on all target with the following error during the configure phase:
configure: error: You must install the Camlp4 pre-processor. On some
operating systems, these are separate packages from the main OCaml compiler,
such as camlp4-extra on Debian.

python-urwid:
fails on all targets, during the check phase.


I forget the exact reason I started writing this email, but I think the plan
was to point out that some build failures on hydra should be not too hard to
fix, and some just need some extra help on armhf/mips64el to compile
correctly. If we think of hydra more as a build test system and only
secondarily for providing binary substitues then checking the failures and
trying to fix them becomes more obvious, and not just for when its something
we wanted built.

-- 
Efraim Flashner   <efraim@flashner.co.il>   אפרים פלשנר
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