Re: Too many questions about texlive-texmf

[Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name>]

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.