Re: make packagers life easier

[Sree Harsha Totakura <sreeharsha@totakura.in>]

On 03/15/2015 06:00 PM, Tomáš Čech wrote:
> 
> How to implement?
> - inject always failing phase into phases list
> 
> Another level of this feature could be even continuing of the build.

I have a similar feature request.  Long time ago when I was packaging
gnunet and curl, I had to spend a lot of time trying to understand why
`make check` phase fails in the build environment.  More often than not,
I had to extensively study the test cases and the testing mechanism
being used to understand and then resolve the failures, much to my
chagrin, by trail-and-error as I did not have access to the build
environment.

Sure, `guix build -K` helped to some extent but there were some
hard-to-debug cases which only failed in the build environment due to
separate network and filesystem namespaces.

I discussed this with Christian and his suggestion was to implement a
debug shell which the guix builder will bail out to when a phase fails.
 The packager can then examine the environment right at the moment where
the failure happens.

I know that since the build happens in a separate namespace this can be
hard to implement, but one idea is to configure the build environments
network namespace to accept connections from localhost and spawn sshd
when the build fails.

WDYT?

Regards,
Sree