Subject: bug#72340: guix should not ask me to report a bug if it fails due to running out of memory

From: Simon Tournier <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 03 Sep 2024 18:09:39 +0200

Hi,

On Tue, 03 Sep 2024 at 11:30, "Zack Weinberg" <[email-masked]> wrote:

> I reconfigured my Guix system to avoid the bug, so I cannot easily
> trigger it anymore.  However, this is not a bug that would go away by
> accident.

Yes for sure, that’s not what I meant. :-)

This can happen if a cycle is introduced, i.e., package foo depending on
package foo.  Or it can happen for other reasons, as it seems the case here.

Well, this bug seems an instance of bug#47543 [1].

1: bug#47543: “Repeated allocation of very large block” during ‘guix pull’
Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]>
Thu, 01 Apr 2021 16:00:06 +0200
id:[email-masked]
https://issues.guix.gnu.org/47543
https://issues.guix.gnu.org/msgid/[email-masked]
https://yhetil.org/guix/[email-masked]

> Also, I don't know what "guix time-machine" does but I would not
> expect "guix describe" to use substantial amounts of memory.  You need
> to run a command that computes a large derivation, such as "guix pull"
> or "guix system reconfigure".

“guix time-machine” runs “guix pull”, other said:

     guix time-machine -q --commit=e4aabf42b33346849cb565199cfafc49d4f0aeff \
       -- time-machine -q --commit=46a64c7fdd057283063aae6df058579bb07c4b6a \
       -- describe

is more or less equivalent to:

    guix pull --commit=e4aabf42b33346849cb565199cfafc49d4f0aeff -p /tmp/host
    /tmp/host/bin/guix pull --commit=46a64c7fdd057283063aae6df058579bb07c4b6a

which minimicks what you ran.  Indeed, I’ve run it on my machine and not
inside some VM with constrained memory.  However, considering bug#47543
[1], I am not convinced the crash comes from this constrained memory.

Hum, maybe it’s worth merging with bug#47543 [1].  WDYT?

Cheers,
simon