Re: [PATCH] gnu: Add hdf4

[Jeremy Robst <jpro@bas.ac.uk>]

Hi,

>> 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

it usually (but not always) fails, if I repeat the build it succeeds, then 
the only way I can get it to fail again is by doing a gc. I haven't 
managed to get the tests to fail building by hand.

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 ?

> Also, I've verified that the part of the patch that touches 
> libhdf4.settings.in is not required for build reproducibility.

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.

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 ?

Jeremy
-- 
jpro@bas.ac.uk | (work) 01223 221402 (fax) 01223 362616
Unix System Administrator - British Antarctic Survey
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