Re: [PATCH] gnu: Add hdf4

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Hello,

Jeremy Robst <jpro@bas.ac.uk> skribis:

>>> Any ideas?
>>
>> I get the same failures intermittently.  Other times the build passes.
>
> Yes, I've built it many times over the past few days - sometimes I get
> a failure, other times it builds ok, like you. If I do
>
> ./pre-inst-env guix gc
> ./pre-inst-env guix build hdf4

Instead, you can run:

  ./pre-inst-env guix build --check hdf4

> Looking at the HDF code it's doing things with the maximum number of
> open files - is there anything guix does when it's creating the
> restricting environment for the build user that would limit the number
> of open files ?

It does not use ‘setrlimit’, which means it inherits the limits of its
parent process.

There was a problem on the maximum number of processes for people
running guix-daemon from systemd, which commit
f489ce3c9343e3ba9927645d11fcb91bb69f0fa7 addressed.

But anyway, I hit the problem on GuixSD, so it’s not systemd-related.

It might be worth trying:

  #:parallel-tests? #f

though I suspect it’s a per-process limit that we’re hitting, not a
global limit.

Next step would be to ask the HDF4 developers.  :-)

> libhdf4.settings includes the build user and the details of the build
> host as well as the build time. This file is included in the final
> build. I patched configure to set the build time to the epoch, taken
> from the HDF5 patch.

Clearing the build time is definitely necessary.

> However I also changed the libhdf4.settings to remove details of the
> build user and build host since I was aiming for reproducibilty across
> builds across machines. E.g I happen to always have built it with the
> user guixbuild00, but if I was building 2 or more things in parallel
> then it might get built with guixbuild01 and I thought this would then
> show us as a different build (since the username would be in
> libhdf4.settings in the file output). Is that right or am I
> misunderstanding something ?

You are right, the user name could differ, so it’s best to patch it if
it gets embedded in the end.

Thanks,
Ludo’.