[aur-general] RFC: PKGBUILD for tensorflow-git

[Eli Schwartz]

On 11/10/2015 10:52 AM, Pieter ROBYNS wrote:
> Dear all,
> 
> I have recently created my first PKGBUILD for the tensorflow project which
> was recently released. This project didn't have a build-from-git AUR
> package yet, so I figured that it would perhaps be useful to other people
> as well and therefore I'd like to share my PKGBUILD on the AUR.
> 
> Since it is my first PKGBUILD however, could anyone please give some
> feedback regarding its structure? I also have a few questions:
> 
> - The build system used for the project (bazel) appears to require a
> specific version for the build to succeed (the one in AUR currently is
> newer and didn't work out of the box) so I had to clone this version of the
> build system and compile it temporarily in order to build tensorflow. Is
> this okay given that the same instructions are given on their website (
> https://tensorflow.org/get_started/os_setup.md#installing_from_sources)?

They recommend not building from HEAD since it *might* be unstable.
And bazel in the AUR is 0.1.0 which is the version they test against,
and the version your PKGBUILD creates.

If it wasn't in the AUR already I would recommend you create a package
for it separately. :p Apparently it can be useful...

> - Another requirement by the project is running a ./configure script before
> building. I did this in prepare(), but the script requires user input. Is
> this a problem, or should it continue automatically?

./configure should be part of build()

prepare() is for things like:
applying patches,
replacing "python" with "python2",
initing git submodules, and configuring them to fetch from a source=()
clone,

etc.

Anyway, I know linux-ck allows you to set an option to run `make
nconfig` during prepare() -- same deal with the linux package in core,
except there it needs to be uncommented.
makepkg won't break when requiring user input. But that ideally should
be limited to situations where there are valid choices that need to be
made -- it looks like you can simply export the right answers via an
environment variable.

> - Finally, I noticed that during build, the CPU usage spikes to 100%
> because bazel parallelizes things. On my machine this caused gcc to crash
> at some point. Do I need to notify the user about this possibility?

I don't think so. Either they want to build it and they'll live with it,
or they don't. I haven't seen warnings like that for other packages.
I guess it is assumed people will make sure they have enough CPU and RAM
if they want to compile large projects.

> Kind regards,
> Pieter Robyns
> 

You should add protobuf to your source=() array, and fix line 36 to
refer to the "google/protobuf" submodule -- not the "protobuf" submodule.

And why are you using /tmp to create the pip package rather than using a
directory inside the build directory?

-- 
Eli Schwartz