Arch Linux

mwarrior92

Member

Registered: 2018-02-28

Posts: 3

AUR building some packages slowly, not using CPU or memory...

I think something seems to be going wrong with my GNU assembler, and I have no idea what or how to fix it.

When I call "yes | sudo aura -Ayu", the upgrade process hangs on building certain packages. First, it hung on goocanvas1 indefinitely. I was able to get around that by uninstalling it along with the application that depended on it. However, later I ran into the issue again when aura began building gstreamer0.10, which I can't remove since my window manager (gnome) appears to depend on it for some reason.

First I assumed it might be just my pc running slow, so I altered /etc/makepkg.config to have MAKEFLAGS="-j4", but that made no difference.

On checking htop, I see that it's hanging on when aura calls "as" (which I assume to be as(1), the GNU assembler). The call (in htop) looks like: "as -I /var/cache/pacman/pkg/gstreamer0.101701/gstreamer0.10/src/gstreamer-0.10.36 -I /var/cache/pkg/gstreamer0.101701/gstreamer0.10/src/gst" (I assume there's more but my screen cuts it off there). Said command is using 0 CPU and 0.1 memory, which seems suspicious given that it hangs there indefinitely.

What should I do from here?

Also note that I can't run "sudo pacman -Syu" right now because some other package is dependent on me upgrading one of my AUR packages - libxfont - first, and libxfont comes after gstreamer in the order chosen by aura (although if there is a way to change this order, that may also help my situation).

Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 30,543

Website

Re: AUR building some packages slowly, not using CPU or memory...

There are many oddities here.  I suggest you put aside the AUR helper(s) for now and just use makepkg.  If for nothing else, so you can get interpretable error messages that you can share here.

Also note that gnome (from the repos) cannot depend on a package from the AUR unless you have replaced a main repo package with one from the AUR.  If that is the case, just reinstall the gstreamer package from the main repos.

It also seems very odd that anything is being built under /var/cache/pacman/pkg, is this a configuration for aura?  This seems like a very bad idea.

As for the libxfont dependency, please see any of the many recent threads on that topic.  And note again, that no repo package can depend on an AUR package.

Last edited by Trilby (2018-02-28 16:07:56)

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"UNIX is simple and coherent" - Dennis Ritchie; "GNU's Not Unix" - Richard Stallman

progandy

Member

Registered: 2012-05-17

Posts: 5,322

Re: AUR building some packages slowly, not using CPU or memory...

You are endlessly piping "y\n" into aura. I wonder what havoc that causes, "as" may not like to receive it on stdin.

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| alias CUTF='LANG=en_XX.UTF-8@POSIX ' | alias ENGLISH='LANG=C.UTF-8 ' |

eschwartz

Fellow

Registered: 2014-08-08

Posts: 4,097

Re: AUR building some packages slowly, not using CPU or memory...

as -I /var/cache/pacman/pkg/gstreamer0.101701/gstreamer0.10/src/gstreamer-0.10.36 -I /var/cache/pkg/gstreamer0.101701/gstreamer0.10/src/gst

Has this been edited by hand? It's weird enough that you would be building in /var/cache/pacman/pkg but it's also pretty worrying that even without the second -I being cut off at src/gst, it abruptly switches from /var/cache/pacman/pkg/ to /var/cache/pkg/

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Managing AUR repos The Right Way -- aurpublish (now a standalone tool)

mwarrior92

Member

Registered: 2018-02-28

Posts: 3

Re: AUR building some packages slowly, not using CPU or memory...

Thanks for the replies, I really appreciate it.

I wound up brute-forcing around this issue (details below), but for anyone else who stumbles on this, I'll make a few clarifications:

- I didn't realize I could scroll right on htop (scrolling right isn't the most common feature in terminal applications...), so the command actually wasn't cut off

- I didn't (to my knowledge) make any manual modifications aura's settings

- running with or without "yes |" didn't seem to make a difference when I tried it

- I mispoke regarding libxfont: libxfont is what was dependent on something pacman -Syu was replacing (with xorgproto); it turns out this was a known issue with recent arch updates which outmoded libxfont's old dependency, which I found out with further searching. Incidentally, the main reason I was trying to aura -Ayu to begin with was to bypass this issue so I could -Syu (the way the error is presented, it looks like it needs a later version of libxfont)

- For reasons I'm not aware of, pacman and aura seemed to both have copies libxfont, further contributing to my confusion and making me think I needed to -Ayu to update libxfont

- I realized with further inspection of htop that apparently pid order isn't necessarily chronological regarding what's currently running (I wasn't aware of the R/S column meaning), so it's possible that some other part of the build process may have been what was hanging (as opposed to specifically the assembler)

I ultimately wound up forcing removal of libxfont (ignoring dependencies it was telling me of by using -Rdd) so I could run -Syu successfully, then reinstalling the apps that were dependent on libxfont.

TL;DR:
So, I say all this to say, I'm personally abandoning this issue for now, as I've worked around what it was stopping me from doing; however, I am still not sure what was making aura's package build processes hang, so the issue this post points to remains unresolved

Last edited by mwarrior92 (2018-03-02 16:27:53)

loqs

Member

Registered: 2014-03-06

Posts: 19,113

Re: AUR building some packages slowly, not using CPU or memory...

- I mispoke regarding libxfont: libxfont is what was dependent on something pacman -Syu was replacing (with xorgproto); it turns out this was a known issue with recent arch updates which outmoded libxfont's old dependency, which I found out with further searching. Incidentally, the main reason I was trying to aura -Ayu to begin with was to bypass this issue so I could -Syu (the way the error is presented, it looks like it needs a later version of libxfont)

If you had explained this in your first post or posted output showing pacman -Syu failing you could have been helped with that issue.

- For reasons I'm not aware of, pacman and aura seemed to both have copies libxfont, further contributing to my confusion and making me think I needed to -Ayu to update libxfont

Aura is a wrapper around pacman for commands requiring pacman.  So you should get the same output from both.

I ultimately wound up forcing removal of libxfont (ignoring dependencies it was telling me of by using -Rdd) so I could run -Syu successfully, then reinstalling the apps that were dependent on libxfont.

Have you checked for broken dependencies since?

TL;DR:
So, I say all this to say, I'm personally abandoning this issue for now, as I've worked around what it was stopping me from doing; however, I am still not sure what was making aura's package build processes hang, so the issue this post points to remains unresolved

If you are abandoning the issue you might consider asking for the topic to be moved to TGN until you return to it.
Edit:
fix quoting TL;DR:

Last edited by loqs (2018-03-02 17:38:53)

mwarrior92

Member

Registered: 2018-02-28

Posts: 3

Re: AUR building some packages slowly, not using CPU or memory...

Aura is a wrapper around pacman for commands requiring pacman.  So you should get the same output from both.

I'm not sure I understand; pacman -Ss and aura -As have always returned (seemingly disjoint) sets of apps for me (with the exception of this libxfont situation).

Have you checked for broken dependencies since?

Directly no; attempts to remove libxfont were telling me that only gnome-shell depended on it. After completing pacman -Syu, I realized I'd specifically lost gnome-terminal somehow (presumably due to dependency issues relating to libxfont), and I reinstalled that by logging in via ctrl+alt+f3. That being said, how do I go about searching for broken dependencies? I see pacman -Qdt, but that seems like the opposite case (listing things that are no longer depended on).

If you are abandoning the issue you might consider asking for the topic to be moved to TGN until you return to it.

Will do.

loqs

Member

Registered: 2014-03-06

Posts: 19,113

Re: AUR building some packages slowly, not using CPU or memory...

Aura is a wrapper around pacman for commands requiring pacman.  So you should get the same output from both.

I'm not sure I understand; pacman -Ss and aura -As have always returned (seemingly disjoint) sets of apps for me (with the exception of this libxfont situation).

The command you have have been referencing so far is aura -Ayu.  Back to what I originally meant.  Aura uses pacman for package installation etc see run-as-root-build-as-a-user so using aura -Ayu to to work around pacman -Syu failing would not work as aura will call pacman internally.

Have you checked for broken dependencies since?

Directly no; attempts to remove libxfont were telling me that only gnome-shell depended on it. After completing pacman -Syu, I realized I'd specifically lost gnome-terminal somehow (presumably due to dependency issues relating to libxfont), and I reinstalled that by logging in via ctrl+alt+f3. That being said, how do I go about searching for broken dependencies? I see pacman -Qdt, but that seems like the opposite case (listing things that are no longer depended on).

pacman -Dkk