Re: linux-libre source tarballs

[Vagrant Cascadian <vagrant@debian.org>]

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On 2021-05-01, Leo Famulari wrote:
> On Sat, May 01, 2021 at 06:45:32PM -0700, Vagrant Cascadian wrote:
>> Pragmatically speaking, on slower platforms this is a huge resource
>> overhead. So much so that ci.guix.gnu.org *usually* times out when
>> generating the linux-libre aarch64 tarballs:
>> 
>>   https://ci.guix.gnu.org/search?query=system%3Aaarch64-linux+linux-libre-arm64-generic
>
> Thanks for letting me know. I didn't know this was happening.
>
> The immediate solution is for me to make sure the tarballs have built
> before committing the updates. I already do this for x86_64 and I can
> start doing it for aarch64 too.

This has definitely helped sometimes, thanks! I even saw a substitute of
linux-libre for aarch64 earlier today! :)

Still, I'm noticing another problem with the way way the tarballs are
generated on ci.guix.gnu.org ...

When it generates a tarball, all the various packages independently try
to recreate the source tarball; so you have at least fours jobs
("linux-libre", "linux-libre-arm64-generic", "linux-libre-headers",
"linux-libre-bpf") all concurrently trying to build the very same
very-slow-to-build tarball on ci.guix.gnu.org. Sometimes one of them
might succeed, but the others may not, and even though one of them
succeeded, none of the failing ones retry...

Not knowing exactly how ci.guix.gnu.org works, would it make sense to
create a tarball package instead of the ... computed origin(?) tarball,
so it could be better represented in the package dependency graph, and
the various linux-libre-* packages can wait till it is available rather
than all trying to recreate the same thing?

That still requires the tarball generation to not time out in the first
place, but maybe it would help with the resource limitations a bit to
only build the source tarball once per architecture?


live well,
  vagrant

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