Weird failure about zef

[zoffixznet]

Can't reproduce any longer. Thanks!

[ugexe]

I suspect if you run with --ll-exception the trace will lead to CompUnit::Repository::Installation.install. NQP errors that happen during the install phase are also indicative of CompUnit::Repository::Installation.install. An additional clue is that the module is actually installed, and fails when precompiling.

This leads to the question: is this a zef or rakudo bug? On one hand zef could reinstall all reverse dependencies. On the other hand if precompilation was disabled this problem would not occur, and because all precomp happens automatically it puts the onus to a correct solution on CompUnit::Repository::Installation.

Personally I don't consider reinstalling all reverse dependencies to be anything more than a hacky workaround; The correct solution is to re-precompile the reverse dependencies, but the only way for a package manager to do that is to do a complete reinstall or to nuke entire precomp directories. CUR should really be handling that automatically.

tl;dr: rakudo is failing to invalidate precomp files in situations that it actually should

[ugexe]

This may be a good reason to finally design the hook system for the various phases. This will allow a workaround (as well as the current Build.pm cruft) to act as compatibility adapters alongside similar before/after style phase modifiers. It will also make it easier to drop (or at least bury) the technical debt of future "temporary" solutions. The current plugin system can probably be adapted to take on this role, essentially allow hooks to wrap each phase plugin (each hook is guaranteed to be called whereas plugins act similar to a lazy iterator where the last plugin in the chain may never need to be called)

In such a system I think the solution is then a pre-install hook script that will delete precomp files for reverse dependencies if the rakudo version is less than $whenever-its-fixed

[FROGGS]

Please test again with latest rakudo. This patch might improve the situation: rakudo/rakudo@d0a00164e9

(if so, we can close https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=128088)