Subject: Re: bug#37482: Guix fails to build libreoffice

From: Jan <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 23 Sep 2019 02:45:35 +0200

On Sun, 22 Sep 2019 19:45:52 +0200
Tobias Geerinckx-Rice <[email-masked]> wrote:

> 2 GiB of RAM is simply not enough to build many packages these 
> days.  That's the world we live in.  There's nothing Guix can do 
> to change that.

Sad, guess I have to buy more RAM.

> You can restrict the number of parallel builds and jobs by 
> respectively passing --max-jobs=1 and --cores=1 to the daemon. 
> You can make this permanent by setting (extra-options …) in your 
> system configuration.

Cool, didn't know about this option.

> Even then, some complex executables will simply fail to link with 
> so little RAM.
> 
> Your issue is different: the exact same libreoffice might have 
> built fine if you had 4 GiB of RAM, or 3, or 5, or 2 with swap, 
> but only if your weren't also running any (Guix or other) builds 
> at the time, or watching a movie, or had the room thermostat 
> turned up, or use Gnome 3, all beneath a gibbous moon.  All these 
> things, and many more, will cause builds to fail or succeed 
> ‘randomly’.

I actually have a 10GB sized swap file created on an SSD and
defined in the config.scm, but it didn't help. I'm also using Mate, but
I can try without any DE. The only two things running in the background
were Mate, mate terminal, Guix and %desktop-services.

> I personally think the annoyances of ‘helpful’ warnings 
> (=extremely inaccurate guesses) would far outweigh any purported 
> benefit.
> 
> Kind regards,
> 
> T G-R

Is there a way to skip building libreoffice, if the substitute isn't
available?

>Or just how quickly it can destroy an SSD.

Even more fun... Waiting for a powerful libre computer from from the
ground, because running on old ThinkPads forever isn't the right
solution.

Thanks for explanations and help,

Jan Wielkiewicz