* Backported patches from `php-7.4` which fixes the env for all
`gettext` and `zlib` tests.
* Setting `--with-libxml-dir` is still needed for versions 7.2 and 7.3.
The motivation for this change is to enable a new Dhall command-line
utility called `dhall-to-nixpkgs` which converts Dhall packages to
buildable Nix packages. You can think of `dhall-to-nixpkgs` as the
Dhall analog of `cabal2nix`.
You can find the matching pull request for `dhall-to-nixpkgs` here:
https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-haskell/pull/1826
The two main changes required to support `dhall-to-nixpkgs` are:
* Two new `buildDhall{Directory,GitHub}Package` utilities are added
`dhall-to-nixpkgs` uses these in the generated output
* `pkgs.dhallPackages` now selects a default version for each package
using the `prefer` utility
All other versions are still buildable via a `passthru` attribute
There are too many regressions. Instead of reverting all the work that has been
done on this so far, let's just disable it Python-wide. That way we can
investigate and fix it easier.
After making `ffmpeg` point to the latest `ffmpeg_4`, all packages that
used `ffmpeg` without requiring a specific version now use ffmpeg_3
explicitly so they shouldn't change.
Also, don't use autoreconfHook on Darwin with Python 3.
Darwin builds are still impure and fail with
ld: warning: directory not found for option '-L/nix/store/6yhj9djska835wb6ylg46d2yw9dl0sjb-configd-osx-10.8.5/lib'
ld: warning: directory not found for option '-L/nix/store/6yhj9djska835wb6ylg46d2yw9dl0sjb-configd-osx-10.8.5/lib'
ld: warning: object file (/nix/store/0lsij4jl35bnhqhdzla8md6xiswgig5q-Libsystem-osx-10.12.6/lib/crt1.10.6.o) was built for newer OSX version (10.12) than being linked (10.6)
DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=/private/tmp/nix-build-python3-3.8.3.drv-0/Python-3.8.3 ./python.exe -E -S -m sysconfig --generate-posix-vars ;\
if test $? -ne 0 ; then \
echo "generate-posix-vars failed" ; \
rm -f ./pybuilddir.txt ; \
exit 1 ; \
fi
/nix/store/dsb7d4dwxk6bzlm845z2zx6wp9a8bqc1-bash-4.4-p23/bin/bash: line 5: 72015 Killed: 9 DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=/private/tmp/nix-build-python3-3.8.3.drv-0/Python-3.8.3 ./python.exe -E -S -m sysconfig --generate-posix-vars
generate-posix-vars failed
make: *** [Makefile:592: pybuilddir.txt] Error 1
When a PEP 517 project file is present, pip will not install
prerequisites in `site-packages`:
https://pip.pypa.io/en/stable/reference/pip/#pep-517-and-518-support
For the shell hook, this has the consequence that the generated
temporary directory that is added to PYTHONPATH does not contain
`site.py`. As a result, Python does not discover the Python
module. Thus when a user executes nix-shell in a project, they cannot
import the project's Python module.
This change adds the `--no-build-isolation` option to pip when
creating the editable environment, to correctly generate `site.py`,
even when a `pyproject.toml` is present.
When a PEP 517 project file is present, pip will not install
prerequisites in `site-packages`:
https://pip.pypa.io/en/stable/reference/pip/#pep-517-and-518-support
For the shell hook, this has the consequence that the generated
temporary directory that is added to PYTHONPATH does not contain
`site.py`. As a result, Python does not discover the Python
module. Thus when a user executes nix-shell in a project, they cannot
import the project's Python module.
This change adds the `--no-build-isolation` option to pip when
creating the editable environment, to correctly generate `site.py`,
even when a `pyproject.toml` is present.
I took a close look at how Debian builds the Python interpreter,
because I noticed it ran substantially faster than the one in nixpkgs
and I was curious why.
One thing that I found made a material difference in performance was
this pair of linker flags (passed to the compiler):
-Wl,-O1 -Wl,-Bsymbolic-functions
In other words, effectively the linker gets passed the flags:
-O1 -Bsymbolic-functions
Doing the same thing in nixpkgs turns out to make the interpreter
run about 6% faster, which is quite a big win for such an easy
change. So, let's apply it.
---
I had not known there was a `-O1` flag for the *linker*!
But indeed there is.
These flags are unrelated to "link-time optimization" (LTO), despite
the latter's name. LTO means doing classic compiler optimizations
on the actual code, at the linking step when it becomes possible to
do them with cross-object-file information. These two flags, by
contrast, cause the linker to make certain optimizations within the
scope of its job as the linker.
Documentation is here, though sparse:
https://sourceware.org/binutils/docs-2.31/ld/Options.html
The meaning of -O1 was explained in more detail in this LWN article:
https://lwn.net/Articles/192624/
Apparently it makes the resulting symbol table use a bigger hash
table, so the load factor is smaller and lookups are faster. Cool.
As for -Bsymbolic-functions, the documentation indicates that it's a
way of saving lookups through the symbol table entirely. There can
apparently be situations where it changes the behavior of a program,
specifically if the program relies on linker tricks to provide
customization features:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xfe/+bug/644645https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=637184#35
But I'm pretty sure CPython doesn't permit that kind of trick: you
don't load a shared object that tries to redefine some symbol found
in the interpreter core.
The stronger reason I'm confident using -Bsymbolic-functions is
safe, though, is empirical. Both Debian and Ubuntu have been
shipping a Python built this way since forever -- it was introduced
for the Python 2.4 and 2.5 in Ubuntu "hardy", and Debian "lenny",
released in 2008 and 2009. In those 12 years they haven't seen a
need to drop this flag; and I've been unable to locate any reports
of trouble related to it, either on the Web in general or on the
Debian bug tracker. (There are reports of a handful of other
programs breaking with it, but not Python/CPython.) So that seems
like about as thorough testing as one could hope for.
---
As for the performance impact: I ran CPython upstream's preferred
benchmark suite, "pyperformance", in the same way as described in
the previous commit. On top of that commit's change, the results
across the 60 benchmarks in the suite are:
The median is 6% faster.
The middle half (aka interquartile range) is from 4% to 8% faster.
Out of 60 benchmarks, 3 come out slower, by 1-4%. At the other end,
5 are at least 10% faster, and one is 17% faster.
So, that's quite a material speedup! I don't know how big the
effect of these flags is for other software; but certainly CPython
tends to do plenty of dynamic linking, as that's how it loads
extension modules, which are ubiquitous in the stdlib as well as
popular third-party libraries. So perhaps that helps explain why
optimizing the dynamic linker has such an impact.
Without this flag, the configure script prints a warning at the end,
like this (reformatted):
If you want a release build with all stable optimizations active
(PGO, etc), please run ./configure --enable-optimizations
We're doing a build to distribute to people for day-to-day use,
doing things other than developing the Python interpreter. So
that's certainly a release build -- we're the target audience for
this recommendation.
---
And, trying it out, upstream isn't kidding! I ran the standard
benchmark suite that the CPython developers use for performance
work, "pyperformance". Following its usage instructions:
https://pyperformance.readthedocs.io/usage.html
I ran the whole suite, like so:
$ nix-shell -p ./result."$variant" --run '
cd $(mktemp -d); python -m venv venv; . venv/bin/activate
pip install pyperformance
pyperformance run -o ~/tmp/result.'"$variant"'.json
'
and then examined the results with commands like:
$ python -m pyperf compare_to --table -G \
~/tmp/result.{$before,$after}.json
Across all the benchmarks in the suite, the median speedup was 16%.
(Meaning 1.16x faster; 14% less time).
The middle half of them ranged from a 13% to a 22% speedup.
Each of the 60 benchmarks in the suite got faster, by speedups
ranging from 3% to 53%.
---
One reason this isn't just the default to begin with is that, until
recently, it made the build a lot slower. What it does is turn on
profile-guided optimization, which means first build for profiling,
then run some task to get a profile, then build again using the
profile. And, short of further customization, the task it would use
would be nearly the full test suite, which includes a lot of
expensive and slow tests, and can easily take half an hour to run.
Happily, in 2019 an upstream developer did the work to carefully
select a more appropriate set of tests to use for the profile:
https://github.com/python/cpython/commit/4e16a4a31https://bugs.python.org/issue36044
This suite takes just 2 minutes to run. And the resulting final
build is actually slightly faster than with the much longer suite,
at least as measured by those standard "pyperformance" benchmarks.
That work went into the 3.8 release, but the same list works great
if used on older releases too.
So, start passing that --enable-optimizations flag; and backport
that good-for-PGO set of tests, so that we use it on all releases.
Some PECLs depend on other PECLs and, like internal PHP extension
dependencies, need to be loaded in the correct order. This makes this
possible by adding the argument "peclDeps" to buildPecl, which adds
the extension to buildInputs and is treated the same way as
internalDeps when the extension config is generated.
@the-kenny did a good job in the past and is set as maintainer in many package,
however since 2017-2018 he stopped contributing. To create less confusion
in pull requests when people try to request his feedback, I removed him as
maintainer from all packages.
This should enable (manual) building of RPMs from python projects using
the `python setup.py bdist_rpm` command on systems where `rpmbuild` is
not located in `/usr/bin/`. (e.g. NixOS)
The discovery of the rpmbuild command was fixed upstream in Python 3.8,
so this commit backports the relevant patch to our currently supported
Python 3 versions.
Fixes: #85204
At the moment, using .withExtensions on a PHP derivation will
produce something which can't be used inside an
environment.systemPackages array, because outputsToInstall refers
to an output which doesn't exist on the final derivation.
Instead, override it back to just containing the single output
"out".
Also passthrough the meta of the package to have description,
homepage, license, maintainers and other metadata passed through to
the commonly used attribute.
Instead of using two different php packages in php-packages.nix, one
wrapper and one unwrapped, simply use the wrapper and use its
"unwrapped" attribute when necessary. Also, get rid of the packages
and extensions attributes from the base package, since they're no
longer needed.
Since the introduction of php.unwrapped there's no real need for the
phpXXbase attributes, so let's remove them to lessen potential
confusion and clutter. Also update the docs to make it clear how to
get hold of an unwrapped PHP if needed.