DebugArtifacts

Julia v1.3 introduced the concept of artifacts, which is a way to deliver to the user some files on the Internet. In the Julia ecosystem, this is often used to provide pre-built packages of binary libraries.

Unfortunately, installation of artifacts can sometimes fail. This is often due to misconfiguration of the network in the user's system, or problems with running the download application (e.g., curl). Usually this manifests with the an error message like the following:

Installed OpenSpecFun_jll ──── v0.5.3+1
ERROR: Unable to automatically install 'OpenSpecFun' from '/home/username/.julia/packages/OpenSpecFun_jll/XrUb6/Artifacts.toml'
Stacktrace:
[...]

The goal of this package is to help the user to identify the source of the problem. Note: this will not fix the underlying issue, but oly make it more apparent.

Installation

This package is not registered, so you have to install it by specifing the URL address. Enter the package manager mode in the REPL with the ] key and run the command

add https://github.com/giordano/DebugArtifacts.jl.git

Usage

The package defines a single function, debug_artifact which takes as argument the string of an artifact. In most cases, you can use any artifact for debuggining, as usually problems with the installation is related to the network, and not specific to a particular artifact.

An example of a successful download of an artifact (OpenSpecFun in this case):

julia> using DebugArtifacts

julia> debug_artifact("OpenSpecFun")
[ Info: Probing for download engine...
[ Info: Probing curl as a possibility...
[ Info:   Probe successful for curl
[ Info: Found download engine curl
[ Info: Probing for compression engine...
[ Info: Probing tar as a possibility...
[ Info:   Probe successful for tar
[ Info: Found compression engine tar
[ Info: Downloading Artifacts.toml to /tmp/jl_g6jz3K/Artifacts.toml...
######################################################################## 100.0%
[ Info: Extracting artifact info for platform x86_64-linux-gnu-libgfortran4-cxx11...
[ Info: Found meta object with git-tree-sha1 846b9ab259c1612b851f8b59bc3658997e23ff57, attempting download...
######################################################################## 100.0%
[ Info: No hash cache found
[ Info: Calculated hash 4f7927ae3ea60d2a44f207afd8e94f4209fb87112f630eac4cdba2b4e03ef5b6 for file /tmp/jl_neyNKK-download.gz
[ Info: Unpacking /tmp/jl_neyNKK-download.gz into /tmp/jl_g6jz3K/unpacked...
[ Info: Double-checking git-tree-sha (this is skipped on Windows)

License

DebugArtifacts is released under the MIT "Expat" License. The original author is Mosè Giordano, with the invaluable help of Elliot Saba.