Cannot determine the brand of your nmake utility

[raku]

Cannot determine the brand of your nmake utility

[vrurg]

Unreproducible under a Win7 VM. I have done a couple of runs (didn't have much time today) but none ended up like this.

The version about appveyor weirdness looks reasonable unless we have a bug in IPC::Cmd module. Neither case means we can ignore it.

When I get a few spare minutes I'll try to setup appveyor for my repo fork and see what happens.

[vrurg]

I have tried several builds in a row over rakudo/rakudo@ef90599 on appveyor. None failed. Do you use the standard appveyor.yml?

[Altai-man]

I think it is about rakudo builds, no? The bug happens from time to time, e.g. https://ci.appveyor.com/project/rakudo/rakudo/builds/32748843/job/7saapt6h27c4ihkr (not so old commit).

[vrurg]

I have googled out an interesting note: https://gitlab.inria.fr/simgrid/simgrid/blob/bc0a801f43c2f629b14e3e6153924fecf6ee9ec5/appveyor.yml#L37

@ugexe can you try perl 5.18 in your setup?

[patrickbkr]

A very simiar problem occurred on HPUX some years ago.
This was the bugreport: bugreport
This was the fix: fix

The fix was then changed to only apply to HPUX. Also it seems run() on Windows takes a different code path, so the fix would not have worked here.
Still I suspect the underlying cause to be the same.

Going back to Perl 5.18 will be difficult as we'll have to rework tools/build/update-submodules.pl to not depend on Perl >= 5.22 on Windows.

I hate our CI to block on a problem like this. Are there any ideas to work around this?

[ugexe]

Are there any ideas to work around this?

Maybe nmake detection needs to try more than once.

[vrurg]

@patrickbkr Can you try @ugexe suggestion? Since I never seen the problem it'll be nearly impossible for me to test.

[patrickbkr]

Not pushed and proven in CI yet. Reopening.

[vrurg]

@patrickbkr I have updated the submodule version on Rakudo to fix NQP and roast repo URLs. You can give it a try now.

[patrickbkr]

Nmake failures haven't shown up since that merge (I did a lot of test builds on AzureCI while I worked on AzureCI integration). So I think this can be closed.