Disable test timeouts in meson check globally

[Atemu]

Issue description

So on my mac with employer-imposed antivirus snakeoil, a build of p11-kit just failed because a test timed out after 30s. Running it a few times with hot caches and with no other builds in the background made it finally pass but that really just shouldn't happen.

We have configurable timeouts for the entire build, so I don't think we need any per-test timeouts. If a test needs a few minutes rather than a few seconds one time, so be it. That shouldn't fail an entire build IMHO.

Question to the community: Should we just disable timeouts in meson checks globally?

meson test --timeout-multiplier 0 should do it according to the documentation but I'm a bit at a loss where meson test is even invoked or else I'd have made a PR. Perhaps meson maintainers know how this works (cc @brandonedens @AndersonTorres).

[Artturin]

meson test

#213845

AFAIK ninja is currently being used to run the tests.

[Atemu]

(e.g. setting custom timeouts for tests — my motivation for this change).

It looks like greater minds have already thought of this.

cc @alyssais

[Artturin]

There's also manually run meson test

nixpkgs/pkgs/development/libraries/folks/default.nix

Lines 91 to 95 in da617ec

	checkPhase = ''
	runHook preCheck
	meson test --timeout-multiplier 4
	runHook postCheck
	'';

[Artek52]

I am running in the same problem, trying to build this #247766, failing 10 times for 10 different timeout errors

[alyssais]

I think the only thing left to do on my PR was to incorporate @jtojnar's documentation suggestion — I can do that soon. I got a bit fed up of so many rounds of review so I put it down for a while.

[alyssais]

#213845 is now in staging.

[theCapypara]

Sorry for bumping this, but I just had p11-kit's (0.25.3) checks timeout on my Mac VM with the nixos-24.05 branch. Is this properly implemented yet, or is there something that needs to be configured?

[szh]

I'm running into the same issue. Is there currently a workaround?

[Artturin]

I'm running into the same issue. Is there currently a workaround?

@szh mesonCheckFlags = [ "--timeout-multiplier" "0" ];

[ofekd]

@Artturin is there a way to apply this globally? I'm getting quite a few timeouts in different packages

Edit: to clarify -- without having all meson-dependent packages recompile, I just want to set this for the cache misses.

[Atemu]

Doing this globally is what this issue is about.

Without rebuilds is not possible as this changes the inputs to the drv.

[ofekd]

Thanks -- I mistakenly thought it was about changing the defaults and that the toggle already existed

[cor]

Tip for those who struggle with this, it appears that the timeouts happen when you nix build a bigger package/nixosConfiguration because your computer is compiling a lot of things at once. A workaround for this is to build the derivation that triggers the timeout in isolation. For example, if you see

error: builder for '/nix/store/ph1h78hg21av397ksi56jz4cxycklrh7-p11-kit-0.25.0.drv' failed with exit code 2;
       last 10 log lines:
       >
       >
       > Ok:                 56
       > Expected Fail:      0
       > Fail:               0
       > Unexpected Pass:    0
       > Skipped:            0
       > Timeout:            2
       >
       > Full log written to /private/tmp/nix-build-p11-kit-0.25.0.drv-3/source/build/meson-logs/testlog.txt
       For full logs, run 'nix log /nix/store/ph1h78hg21av397ksi56jz4cxycklrh7-p11-kit-0.25.0.drv'.

Then you can fix it by running:

nix-build /nix/store/ph1h78hg21av397ksi56jz4cxycklrh7-p11-kit-0.25.0.drv

(Note the hyphen! nix-build rather than nix build)

Wait for that to complete, and then re-run your original command

[alienman5k]

I'm running into the same issue. Is there currently a workaround?

@szh mesonCheckFlags = [ "--timeout-multiplier" "0" ];

Where is this setting supposed to be set? Should I override an existing package that is failing (p11-kit) and add this attribute?

[Artturin]

#356589

[alienman5k]

Just in case anyone still facing this issue, to me instructions were not clear, but I assumed that the settings described above had to be set in an overlay, so below is my snippet:

final: prev: {
 p11-kit = prev.p11-kit.overrideAttrs (oldAttrs: {
   mesonCheckFlags = oldAttrs.mesonCheckFlags or [] ++ [ 
     "--timeout-multiplier" "0" 
   ];
 });
}