Re: *** TRYING TO INSTALL GUIXSD v0.15.0 FOR DAYS ***

[Brian Woodcox]

Hi Mark,

Thanks for the debugging tips.

I will try your suggestions next and see where it takes me.

> On Oct 31, 2018, at 7:35 PM, Mark H Weaver <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> Hi Brian,
> 
> Brian Woodcox <address@hidden> writes:
> 
>> This is what is displaced on the screen when the hang occurs:
>> 
>> …
>> make  check-TESTS
>> make[3]: Entering directory ‘/tmp/guix-build-guile-2.2.3.drv-0/guile-2.2.3’
>> Testing /tmp/guix-build-guile-2.2.3.drv-0/guile-2.2.3/meta/guile …
>> with GUILE_LOAD_PATH=/tmp/guix-guild-guile-2.2.3.drv-0/guile-2.2.3/test-suite
> 
> Thanks.  These last messages were printed by the 'check-guile' script,
> just before it passes control to test-suite/guile-test, which runs the
> tests in test-suite/tests/*.test.  I guess it's getting stuck during the
> initialization of 'guile-test', because it prints a message before
> running each test.
> 
> At this point, I see a few possible next steps, from easy to harder:
> 
> (1) You could wait until hydra.gnu.org comes back online, which I expect
> to happen sometime next week.  Hydra has a full set of substitutes for
> 0.15.0, so you shouldn't need to build Guile at that point.
> 
> (2) You could try QEMU instead.  I suspect that Guix has seen far more
> testing under QEMU than VirtualBox, because QEMU is in Guix and not
> VirtualBox.  If it fails in QEMU, then we will have a test case that
> Guix developers can try to reproduce on their own systems.
> 
> (3) If you felt like getting your hands dirty and digging deeper to
> investigate this problem and find its source, read on:
> 
> You could try the same build with "--keep-failed" added to the Guix
> command line, and interrupt it after it gets stuck.  At that point, you
> should have write access to /tmp/guix-guild-guile-2.2.3.drv-0, and you
> can enter that directory and try various experiments.
> 
> /tmp/guix-guild-guile-2.2.3.drv-0/environment-variables will contain the
> environment variable settings that were passed to the top-level build
> commands, including "make check".  In that directory, run:
> 
>  env -i `which bash`
> 
> or a similar command to clear the environment, and then "source
> environment-variables" to load the environment settings.  Then 'cd' into
> the guile source directory and run ./check-guile.
> 
> Hopefully it will get stuck here as well.  If so, you could use GDB to
> attach to the stuck guile process and obtain a backtrace.  It might also
> be useful to see the output of "strace -f ./check-guile".
> 
> There are many other things that could be tried at this point, such as
> removing the "--debug" flag passed to guile at the end of 'check-guile',
> inserting debugging print statements at various points in the
> 'guile-test' script, etc.
> 
> Hopefully one of these options is workable.  Sorry for the bother.
> 
>     Regards,
>       Mark