[Nix-dev] Re: Stdenv compilation times

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi Eelco,

Eelco Dolstra <e.dolstra at tudelft.nl>
writes:

> Ludovic Courtès wrote:
>
>>> Ludovic Courtès wrote:
>>>>> So I propose disabling "make check" in PPL.
>>>> As you know GCC is the dependency of about all of Nixpkgs.  To me it
>>>> makes a lot of sense to spend an effort having the core development
>>>> tools well tested by default.
>>> Why - by default?
>> 
>> Because I want my OS to work as reliably as possible, by default.
>
> Obviously that's important, but it doesn't mean other considerations (such as
> build time) are irrelevant.

I don’t expect to build GCC and its dependencies by hand anyway, so to
me build time is irrelevant.  But I can understand others (e.g., Lluís,
who is currently the only building on ARM) have a different take on
this.

> Here we're talking about increasing the stdenv build time by a factor
> of 3

I agree that stdenv is on the critical path of the dependency DAG.
OTOH, 6 hours is negligible compared to the time it takes to build even
a small subset of Nixpkgs.

> or so for a small library providing functionality that doesn't appear
> to be used in Nixpkgs for the moment.

Well, it’s used in GCC.  Did you mean that GCC is used in such a way
that PPL isn’t used in practice?

> For reliability it would be a lot more useful to run GCC's testsuite, but that
> might be hard in the bootstrap because of the dependency on Tcl and Expect.

Agreed.

Thanks,
Ludo’.