[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
Re-enable tincified pandoc, panpipe, panhandle
- Subject: Re-enable tincified pandoc, panpipe, panhandle
- From: Chris Warburton
- Date: Fri, 09 Jun 2017 18:53:02 +0100
- Resolution: fixed
- State: resolved
In "basic.nix", we would like to make pandoc, panpipe and panhandle available.
The problem is, they're taking a long time to build, and they keep getting
rebuilt due to cache misses.
These cache misses are due to "tincify" using the latest Hackage index, which is
fetched by "cabal update" in hackageDb.nix. Even if the same packages, versions,
etc. are chosen by the dependency resolution of cabal/tinc, Nix will still
rebuild the last package, since it's dependencies (the hash of hackageDb, which
includes the hash of its dependency on currentTime) have changed.
To avoid this, we've made stableHackageDb, which is built from a specific
revision of the all-cabal-files git repo. This lets us build our index in a
(mostly) deterministic way: the input (git revision) is deterministic and fixed,
so that won't cause any rebuilds; the stableHackageDb builder may or may not be
deterministic, but in any case its results won't meaningfully change across
rebuilds, even if they turn out not to be bit-identical; since the git revision
doesn't change, and stableHackageDb doesn't need to be rebuilt until the git
revision gets bumped, we should only end up building each tincified Haskell
package once (there's no usage of currentTime, etc.).
Note that we're assuming that tincify and cabal will happily coexist, with
subsequent bumps to stableHackageDb's git revision not causing any interference
with e.g. dependency resolution. This assumption seems justified, since:
- Cabal only cares about globally installed packages, and the Hackage index.
We're not using cabal to instal packages globally, we're doing everything in
Nix or in sandboxes. Hence only the index should matter, and that's fixed and
deterministic.
- Tinc seems to be specifically engineered to be deterministic, i.e. allowing
multiple versions of cached files (e.g. cabal2nix outputs for packages) to
live side-by-side in its cache.
This means we can use the "cache.global" mode of tincify in confidence, without
rebuilding anything until we decide to bump the git revision of stableHackageDb.