bug#23165: Test suite failures building 0.10.0 on CentOS7

[Ludovic Courtès]

"Cook, Malcolm" <address@hidden> skribis:

> Thanks for the reminder about 
> https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/html_node/Running-the-Test-Suite.html
>     I note there too that I should be emailing address@hidden instead of 
> guix-devel.  I've cc:ed it this time.  What is the best going forward?

Yeah, using address@hidden for bug reports is the best way.

> I am building the release from git since I want to ./configure with a
> non-standard --localstatedir of /gnu/var

This can also be done when building from the tarball: just run

  tar xf guix-0.10.0.tar.gz
  cd guix-0.10.0
  ./configure --localstatedir=/gnu/var
  …

> In any case I have reduced the issues by adding to my install mantra:
>
>       export ACLOCAL_PATH=/usr/share/aclocal # as per 
> https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/guix.html#Building-from-Git

Another reason for using the release tarball: there’d be no such issues!
:-)

> In guix/cve.scm:
>   76: 2 [call-with-cve-port # 518400 ...]
> In guix/http-client.scm:
>  300: 1 [http-fetch/cached # # 518400 ...]
> In unknown file:
>    ?: 0 [string-append #f "/http/" 
> "Fjb931UJRoTPOjHq6hc1oawK9bCopdhOoX9grKLx71Q="]
>
> ERROR: In procedure string-append:
> ERROR: In procedure string-append: Wrong type (expecting string): #f'

This is a harmless failure: it indicates that neither the HOME nor the
XDG_CACHE_HOME environment variables are defined in the build
environment.  Could you define one of these (they can point any writable
directory) and run ‘make recheck’?

Surely we should handle this situation better.  I guess
‘cache-directory’ in (guix utils) should just error out in such a case,
with a clear error message.  Thoughts?

Thanks,
Ludo’.