Subject: bug#24496: offloading should fall back to local build after n tries

From: ng0 <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 04 Oct 2016 17:08:58 +0000

Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]> writes:

> Hello!
>
> ng0 <[email-masked]> skribis:
>
>> When I forgot that my build machine is offline and I did not pass
>> --no-build-hook, the offloading keeps trying forever until I had to
>> cancel the build, boot the build-machine and started the build again.
>>
>> A solution could be a config option or default behavior which after
>> failing to offload for n times gives up and uses the local builder.
>>
>> Is this desired at all? Setups like hydra could get problems, but for
>> small setups with the same architecture there could be a solution beyond
>> --no-build-hook?
>
> Like you say, on Hydra-style setup this could be a problem: the
> front-end machine may have --max-jobs=0, meaning that it cannot perform
> builds on its own.
>
> So I guess we would need a command-line option to select a different
> behavior.  I’m not sure how to do that because ‘guix offload’ is
> “hidden” behind ‘guix-daemon’, so there’s no obvious place for such an
> option.

Could the daemon run with --enable-hydra-style or --disable-hydra-style
and --disable-hydra-style would allow falling back to local build if
after a defined time - keeping slow connections in mind - the machine
did not reply.

> In the meantime, you could also hack up your machines.scm: it would
> return a list where unreachable machines have been filtered out.

How can I achieve this?

And to append to this bug: it seems to me that offloading requires 1
lsh-key for each
build-machine. (https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-guix/2016-10/msg00007.html)
and that you can not directly address them (say I want to create some
system where I want to build on machine 1 AND machine 2. Having 2 x86_64
in machines.scm only selects one of them (if 2 were working, see linked
thread) and builds on the one which is accessible first. If however the
first machine is somehow blocked and it fails, therefore terminates lsh
connection, the build does not happen at all.

Leaving out the problems, what I want to do in short: How could I build
on both systems at the same time when I desire to do so?

> Ludo’.

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