bug#29634: Hydra fails to honor 'max-silent-time' for early guile build

[Ludovic Courtès]

Mark H Weaver <address@hidden> skribis:

> address@hidden (Ludovic Courtès) writes:
>
>> Mark H Weaver <address@hidden> skribis:
>>
>>> An early 'guile' build on armhf-linux consistently fails on Hydra,
>>> because the 'timeout' and 'max-silent-time' properties are not honored.
>>> For example:
>>>
>>>   https://hydra.gnu.org/build/2391845
>>>
>>> This is a longstanding issue.  In past core-updates cycles, I have
>>> worked around the problem by rebuilding these early 'guile' derivations
>>> from Hydra's command line, passing --timeout and --max-silent-time
>>> manually, and then restarting the many dependency failures.
>>>
>>> It would be good to fix this issue properly.
>>>
>>> My guess is that the build parameters are not honored because there is
>>> no Hydra 'job' associated with this early 'guile'.
>>
>> Exactly.  Or maybe there’s one but this early ‘guile’ is built as a
>> dependency of another job.
>
> How do you think we should fix this?

Of course I’d prefer if Guile compile times were shorter.

Besides, we should probably handle timeouts per-derivation rather than
globally (currently timeout are per-session, see ‘set-build-options’).
We could do that by adding a new special value in the environment
variable map of derivation (as is the case for, e.g.,
“exportReferencesGraph”) that the daemon would honor.  It’s a
rebuild-the-world change though.

Ludo’.