Subject: bug#55499: closed (Re: bug#55499: excessively large manifests due to propagation)

From: [email-masked] (GNU bug Tracking System)
Date: Fri, 01 Jul 2022 21:55:02 +0000

Your bug report

#55499: excessively large manifests due to propagation

which was filed against the guix package, has been closed.

The explanation is attached below, along with your original report.
If you require more details, please reply to [email-masked].

-- 
55499: https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=55499
GNU Bug Tracking System
Contact [email-masked] with problems

Subject: Re: bug#55499: excessively large manifests due to propagation
From: Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Cc: Ricardo Wurmus <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 01 Jul 2022 23:54:41 +0200
List-Id: <debbugs-submit.debbugs.gnu.org>

Hi!

I went ahead and pushed it as 4ff12d1de7cd617b791996ee7ca1240660b4c20e.

Ludo’.

Subject: excessively large manifests due to propagation
From: Ricardo Wurmus <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Cc: Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 18 May 2022 15:53:06 +0200
List-Id: <debbugs-submit.debbugs.gnu.org>

Packages of some languages rely heavily on propagation.  R is one
example.  Since the generated “manifest” file of a Guix profile records
entries for all propagated packages, this can get really big really
quickly.

A profile consisting only of four R packages (r-seurat, r-cistopic,
r-monocle3, and r-cicero-monocle3) results in a “manifest” file that
weighs 7.1MB.  At the MDC I repeatedly encountered manifest files that
are exceeding 24MB.

Simply reading that big a file with

    (call-with-input-file "huge-manifest" read)

takes several seconds.  On the MDC cluster I observed a delay of about
27 seconds.

Disabling read positions with (read-disable 'positions) significantly
speeds this up (18s vs 27s), but it’s still very slow.

We may be able to speed things up by supporting definitions or
references in manifest files, so that we don’t need to repeat a sub-tree
when generating the file.

-- 
Ricardo