Too many questions about texlive-texmf

Too many questions about texlive-texmf

[Leo Famulari]

We don't serve substitutes of texlive-texmf. We achieve this by
configuring nginx to return "410 Gone" [0].

This requires users to build it with '--fallback', and the Guix error
message even recommends this, but many users ask about it on IRC.

I think we should mark it '#:substitutable? #f' so that, IIUC, Guix will
download and build texlive-texmf from the upstream source automatically,
without stopping or requiring users to use '--fallback'.

If everyone agrees to this, exactly which package or packages should be
have this option set? There are several related variables in (gnu
packages tex) and I'm not sure how to achieve the desired goal of making
this "just work" for our users.

[0]
http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix/maintenance.git/tree/hydra/nginx/hydra.gnu.org-locations.conf#n14

Re: Too many questions about texlive-texmf

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name> writes:

> We don't serve substitutes of texlive-texmf. We achieve this by
> configuring nginx to return "410 Gone" [0].
>
> This requires users to build it with '--fallback', and the Guix error
> message even recommends this, but many users ask about it on IRC.
>
> I think we should mark it '#:substitutable? #f' so that, IIUC, Guix will
> download and build texlive-texmf from the upstream source automatically,
> without stopping or requiring users to use '--fallback'.

Does this cause substitutes to be disabled for all packages that depend
on texlive-texmf?

~~ Ricardo

Re: Too many questions about texlive-texmf

[Efraim Flashner]

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On Mon, Jul 11, 2016 at 09:42:34AM +0200, Ricardo Wurmus wrote:
> 
> Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name> writes:
> 
> > We don't serve substitutes of texlive-texmf. We achieve this by
> > configuring nginx to return "410 Gone" [0].
> >
> > This requires users to build it with '--fallback', and the Guix error
> > message even recommends this, but many users ask about it on IRC.
> >
> > I think we should mark it '#:substitutable? #f' so that, IIUC, Guix will
> > download and build texlive-texmf from the upstream source automatically,
> > without stopping or requiring users to use '--fallback'.
> 
> Does this cause substitutes to be disabled for all packages that depend
> on texlive-texmf?
> 
> ~~ Ricardo
> 

I don't know. Among the packages based on this is libreoffice, which I'm
guessing many people who would use it would never install it if they
always needed to build it from source. Based on the notes in maths.scm on
openblas, `#:substitutable? #f' also disables offloading, so while we don't
want to serve the file from hydra, we don't want to prevent people from
offloading the build to a more powerful machine. Is there a way that we
can mark that it hasn't been built yet on hydra? Or can we change the
error message for when it fails to download a file from hydra to:

Package "foo" failed to download. This may be because:
1. not yet built on hydra
2. fails to build, please help fix
3. broken pipe, try again

If you would like to try building it on your machine to work around 1 or
3, please add '--fallback' to your command.


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Re: Too many questions about texlive-texmf

[ng0]

Efraim Flashner writes:

> On Mon, Jul 11, 2016 at 09:42:34AM +0200, Ricardo Wurmus wrote:
>> 
>> Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name> writes:
>> 
>> > We don't serve substitutes of texlive-texmf. We achieve this by
>> > configuring nginx to return "410 Gone" [0].
>> >
>> > This requires users to build it with '--fallback', and the Guix error
>> > message even recommends this, but many users ask about it on IRC.
>> >
>> > I think we should mark it '#:substitutable? #f' so that, IIUC, Guix will
>> > download and build texlive-texmf from the upstream source automatically,
>> > without stopping or requiring users to use '--fallback'.
>> 
>> Does this cause substitutes to be disabled for all packages that depend
>> on texlive-texmf?
>> 
>> ~~ Ricardo
>> 
>
> I don't know. Among the packages based on this is libreoffice, which I'm
> guessing many people who would use it would never install it if they
> always needed to build it from source. Based on the notes in maths.scm on
> openblas, `#:substitutable? #f' also disables offloading, so while we don't
> want to serve the file from hydra, we don't want to prevent people from
> offloading the build to a more powerful machine. Is there a way that we
> can mark that it hasn't been built yet on hydra? Or can we change the
> error message for when it fails to download a file from hydra to:
>
> Package "foo" failed to download. This may be because:
> 1. not yet built on hydra
> 2. fails to build, please help fix
> 3. broken pipe, try again
>
> If you would like to try building it on your machine to work around 1 or
> 3, please add '--fallback' to your command.

I find a change in the error message more favorable.
Big packages like libreoffice can take up to 12 hours or more,
and when you run something very old or otherwise limited maybe
even impossible due to hardware resource reasons.

-- 
♥Ⓐ  ng0
For non-prism friendly talk find me on http://www.psyced.org
SecuShare – http://secushare.org

Re: Too many questions about texlive-texmf

[Leo Famulari]

On Mon, Jul 11, 2016 at 09:42:34AM +0200, Ricardo Wurmus wrote:
> 
> Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name> writes:
> 
> > We don't serve substitutes of texlive-texmf. We achieve this by
> > configuring nginx to return "410 Gone" [0].
> >
> > This requires users to build it with '--fallback', and the Guix error
> > message even recommends this, but many users ask about it on IRC.
> >
> > I think we should mark it '#:substitutable? #f' so that, IIUC, Guix will
> > download and build texlive-texmf from the upstream source automatically,
> > without stopping or requiring users to use '--fallback'.
> 
> Does this cause substitutes to be disabled for all packages that depend
> on texlive-texmf?

If so, I'd say it's a bug :)

Re: Too many questions about texlive-texmf

[Leo Famulari]

On Mon, Jul 11, 2016 at 11:21:21AM +0300, Efraim Flashner wrote:
> I don't know. Among the packages based on this is libreoffice, which I'm
> guessing many people who would use it would never install it if they
> always needed to build it from source. Based on the notes in maths.scm on
> openblas, `#:substitutable? #f' also disables offloading, so while we don't
> want to serve the file from hydra, we don't want to prevent people from
> offloading the build to a more powerful machine.

Right, we don't want to stand in the way of people with more powerful
hardware and more bandwidth. This is a concern I brought up the last
time we had this discussion. [0] The limitations of our current hardware
should probably not be baked into the Guix codebase.

On the other hand, I think that for each user that comes to IRC or
help-guix to ask about this, there are several more that give up or
(hopefully without too much frustration) figure it out. It's a bad user
experience.

[0]
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2016-04/msg00386.html

> Is there a way that we can mark that it hasn't been built yet on
> hydra? Or can we change the error message for when it fails to
> download a file from hydra to:
> 
> Package "foo" failed to download. This may be because:
> 1. not yet built on hydra
> 2. fails to build, please help fix
> 3. broken pipe, try again
> 
> If you would like to try building it on your machine to work around 1 or
> 3, please add '--fallback' to your command.

I think that the current error message is clear that the solution is to
try again with --fallback. I think that if people won't read this error
message, they probably won't read a longer error message. Although
perhaps the list format will catch their eye.

Re: Too many questions about texlive-texmf

[Ludovic Courtès]

Efraim Flashner <efraim@flashner.co.il> skribis:

> On Mon, Jul 11, 2016 at 09:42:34AM +0200, Ricardo Wurmus wrote:
>> 
>> Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name> writes:
>> 
>> > We don't serve substitutes of texlive-texmf. We achieve this by
>> > configuring nginx to return "410 Gone" [0].
>> >
>> > This requires users to build it with '--fallback', and the Guix error
>> > message even recommends this, but many users ask about it on IRC.
>> >
>> > I think we should mark it '#:substitutable? #f' so that, IIUC, Guix will
>> > download and build texlive-texmf from the upstream source automatically,
>> > without stopping or requiring users to use '--fallback'.
>> 
>> Does this cause substitutes to be disabled for all packages that depend
>> on texlive-texmf?

No, it just sets a flag in the texlive-texmf derivation itself (search
for “substituable?” in (guix derivations)).

> Based on the notes in maths.scm on
> openblas, `#:substitutable? #f' also disables offloading,

I don’t see this comment, but this bug was fixed last year:
<http://bugs.gnu.org/18747>.  :-)

So I think Leo’s suggestion is a good one.  I believe only texlive-texmf
itself needs #:substitutable? #f.

Thoughts?

Ludo’.