gnutls 3.6.12 can consistently fail to build

Hi,

While attempting to run...

guix pull --cores=1 --max-jobs=1 --no-substitutes

...after installing Guix System in an x86_64 VM using...

...I was unable to build gnutls 3.6.12. This prevented me from running

"guix pull" without using substitutes. Substitutes are available for

this derivation, so it seems that a build succeeded at some point on the

build farm. However, in my VM, I tried 71 times to build the

problematic gnutls derivation repeatedly, and it failed every time.

Every time, the error was: "You need openssl to run this test"

It was mentioned in the IRC chat that this is a known issue, but I could

not find a bug report about it:

"<efraim> gnutls@3.6.12 is known to fail, something about missing the

time window when it will build and pass the tests"

--

Chris

Is it https://bugs.gnu.org/44559?

That bug is about GnuTLS 3.6.12 being written to expire — there is not

really much we can do about it.

It's happened more than once, too.

Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name> writes:

Yes, upon closer investigation, that was indeed the cause. I can

confirm that I was able to work around the issue by traveling back in

time to January 1st, 2020 and doing the build then.

Going back to the future, that will be the hard part now...

--

Chris