Re: Preliminary IceCat 68.2 package

[Mark H Weaver]

I wrote:
> * Many earlier attempts to build it have failed due to non-deterministic
>   failures in the build system, possibly due to a bug in the Cargo tool.
>   I'm not sure how much luck was involved in my successful build.  Your
>   mileage may vary.

Having now done a few more test builds, I'm sorry to say that the build
seems to often fail non-deterministically.  Most of my attempts have
failed so far.

The most common failure mode is described in these bug reports for
Gentoo and BLFS:

  https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=680934
  http://wiki.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/ticket/11975#comment:6

Those errors, where a backtrace is printed by cargo, happen at a
different place in the build every time.  If you're lucky, you might get
through the entire build without hitting that bug.

I'd be very grateful for help debugging these failures or finding a
workaround.

Note that the 'wip-icecat-68' branch is at the precise commit where I
had my successful build.  In case anyone is interested, I've made
available the NAR of my successful, ungrafted build here:
<https://www.netris.org/~mhw/guix/icecat-68-preview/>.  Note that the
NAR doesn't include any dependencies, so you'll need to build those
locally before importing the NAR, and then apply grafts locally
afterwards.  Also note that I cannot guarantee the integrity of the
machine that I built it on, which includes a web server and mail server,
among other things, so I cannot guarantee the integrity of the NAR
itself.  I prefer to avoid distributing binaries for that reason, but if
you want to try it, there it is.

      Mark