Subject: bug#43802: Knot: Linker runs very slowly and crashes during build

From: Simon South <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 04 Oct 2020 20:09:30 -0400

Turns out this is not a bug. Knot ships with two parser implementations:
A smaller, slower one (272 KB) and a larger, faster one (1.9 MB). The
larger one is a bit too big to build reliably on systems with 4 GB or
less of available memory.

To test Knot on these machines, you can run "configure" with
"--disable-fastparser" as an argument (or edit gnu/packages/dns.scm to
do so) to force it to use the smaller parser. This also allows the build
to complete more quickly on systems that can use either.

So how was I getting the smaller implementation in my own builds without
realizing it? The configure script has some magical behaviour: It will
automatically select the faster-building implementation if it finds a
".git" folder in the current directory. This is presumably meant to help
developers, but the confusion it caused me demonstrates why I think this
sort of magical programming is bad practice.

At any rate, this bug report can be closed.

-- 
Simon South
[email-masked]