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

From: Simon South <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 04 Oct 2020 19:01:06 -0400

So naturally, as soon as I submit the bug report something occurs to me
that gets me unstuck.

The delay and crash are occuring while libtool is using gcc to compile
src/libzscanner/scanner.c, which appears to be generated at build time
from the file scanner.c.t0 in the same directory.

When I build Knot on my own, scanner.c has a size of 272 KB. When guix
builds it, scanner.c somehow balloons out to 1.9 MB! So naturally gcc is
going to need some time and space to make its way through all that code.

In fact the build process actually points out

  NOTE: Compilation of scanner.c can take several minutes!

So perhaps all this is completely expected. Still... 1.9 MB. Of C
code. It's tempting to think something is going wrong here. (And anyway,
why the huge discrepancy in file size?)

I'm investigating.

-- 
Simon South
[email-masked]