Hi Danny,
Danny Milosavljevic <address@hidden> skribis:
The failure mode here is very very bad. Guix will consume all available
memory and then start on the swap, at which point the computer will
become unresponsive to any input and the user can't save any open
documents and has to kill the power to the computer.
I agree that the failure mode is terrible. It’s very likely a cycle in
the package graph, given the symptoms you describe. So ‘guix build
OFFENDING-PACKAGE’ would probably give you the same result.
Chris Baines proposed a patch a while back to detect and report cycles,
but we never got around to polishing and integrating it. That would
probably help a lot in these cases.
We can open a new bug for that (if there’s not already one), but I think
it should be framed in terms of cycle detection in the package graph and
error reporting.