core-updates-frozen on powerpc64le-linux (was: Core updates frozen.)

[Thiago Jung Bauermann <bauermann@kolabnow.com>]

Hello!

Em quarta-feira, 28 de julho de 2021, às 08:50:16 -03, Mathieu Othacehe 
escreveu:
> Hello,
> 
> A new core-updates-frozen branch is available here:
> https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/log/?h=core-updates-frozen.

Hooray!

> This means that the core-updates branch remains open, while the
> core-updates-frozen branch will only accept bug fixes.
> 
> This branch contains exciting new features, such as:
> 
> * Switch to GCC 10.
> * Update to TexLive 2021.
> * Simplified package inputs[1].
> * Build system Gexp support[2].
> * Meson cross-compilation support[3].
> 
> between lots of other things.

Really nice refresh indeed.

> Cuirass has started evaluating this branch here:
> https://ci.guix.gnu.org/jobset/core-updates-frozen. According to the
> related dashboard, there's still a bit of work required to stabilize
> this branch: https://ci.guix.gnu.org/eval/68124/dashboard.

There are no results for powerpc64le-linux. Does anyone know why?

> Your help is welcome :).

A few days ago I requested access to a VM on the Unicamp/IBM Minicloud, and 
had it granted a couple of hours later so now now I have a POWER VM to play 
with. :-)  I was a bit surprised to see it’s actually a POWER8 system 
rather than POWER9, but I don’t think it matters for Guix development and 
tests.

I’m using a guest with 8 vCPUs and Debian testing installed. Guix is 
working fine on it, installed from Debian’s experimental ‘guix’ package 
(thanks vagrant!) and then updated from v1.3 to master with `guix pull`. 
The Minicloud allows use for 30 days, and can extend it to 30 more days. 
Hopefuly, that should be enough to help get core-updates in shape on 
powerpc64le-linux.

The last Cuirass evaluation of core-updates with powerpc64le-linux results 
is https://ci.guix.gnu.org/eval/67285 so I tried to run the failed builds 
on my VM to see what the current state is. My core-updates-frozen branch 
was at commit f8458a228224 (”build-system/python: Handle missing metadata 
on Python 2.”) when I did these builds.

At first, I didn’t try the “*tarball*” builds because I didn’t want to 
focus on the bootstrap binaries. Apart from those, I was glad to see that 
all failed powerpc64le-linux builds from that evaluation built fine on my 
VM, except for the ones below:

• gcc-toolchain@4.8
• gcc-toolchain@5.5
• gmp@4.3.2 aka `(@@ (gnu packages commencement) gmp-boot)`
• mpfr@2.4.2 aka `(@@ (gnu packages commencement) mpfr-boot)`
• mpc@1.0.3 aka `(@@ (gnu packages commencement) mpc-boot)`

I later tried building ‘bootstrap-tarballs’, but it failed during the build 
of the static gawk binary.

I also did a `guix pull --branch=core-updates-frozen`, which built a ton of 
stuff and completed successfully. At the time, core-updates-frozen was at 
commit 5e4cdb5b3b1d (”gnu: python-django: Fix test failure.”)

So next step for me is to look into the build failures above. I’ll semi-
randomly start with ‘gmp-boot’ and see what I can find out.

-- 
Thanks,
Thiago