Alvin Hsu

I believe I may have found one more case. Recompilation is triggered for at least a subset of packages in $XSB_DIR/packages. I can get it to reliably reproduce with the following shell script on a fresh build of git-origin (using [wildmatch] as an example, although brief testing of [regmatch] shows the same result): # In $XSB_DIR # Attempt to load [wildmatch] package, and see it works fine without # recompilation. bin/xsb # Simulate all timestamps being set as Guix does ($date is arbitrary; just...

Hi Michael, The touch commands were meant to emulate an XSB source file having the same modtime as its compiled file. This issue is not unique to xsb_configuration.P; I just used it as an example. Guix sets all file modtimes to the UNIX epoch and installs packages in read-only directories for reproducibility purposes, so this issue should show up with any built-in recompile-able module.

Hi David, It looks like XSB still encounters the same error. The offender seems to be the use of path_sysop/3 on line 227 of consult.P in this case; I've attached a patch that swaps it out for file_strictly_older_than/2 which allows me to start the REPL without an error.

Hi Michael, Thanks for going through with this! Unfortunately, it appears that the issue is still present at commit [660f0f79b1007f2f0be5bfa4e079abaf12b4f1d9]; building without my patch results in XSB attempting to recompile for equal modtimes as it did before. I've written a shell script that reproduces this on my end with a standard (non-Guix) build that follows "Installing XSB under UNIX" in the manual: # Example with xsb_configuration file, but similarly errors out when applied to # other files...

Hello again, I finally got around to bringing the modtime recompilation issue up with others in the Guix community, and it seems like resolving it without a downstream patch would indeed require a change in how XSB decides when recompilation is needed. Would a build-time flag for determining this be acceptable? An environment variable check might also work (we can wrap xsb to always have it set in this case).

Hello Michael, Admittedly, I think this bug report was a bit premature given my experience, and I should have taken some more time with it - apologies for that. I'm still interested in working on getting this upstream, but I'll likely need to look over this and work more closely with the Guix maintainers to see if some of these issues should/can be taken care of on the packaging side. Hopefully I can get back soon on this; for now, perhaps it might be useful for others looking to package XSB for...

Packaging XSB for Guix