Julia: Uninformative error message for non-precompilable module

[Vectornaut]

After an update, I tried to use the module Gadfly and got the following error message.

WARNING: Module Compat with uuid 11748883728107 is missing from the cache.

This may mean module Compat does not support precompilation but is imported by a module that does.

ERROR: LoadError: Declaring __precompile__(false) is not allowed in files that are being precompiled.

It took me a few minutes of searching to find issue #12508 and learn that I could work around the error by turning the REPL off and on again.

I would have appreciated being told up front, in the error message, that this was an minor annoyance I could work around easily, rather than a major bug that would make Gadfly unusable until the next release. (I seem to recall from the issue tracker that such catastrophic bugs have been seen before.)

versioninfo():

• Julia Version 0.5.0
• Commit 3c9d753 (2016-09-19 18:14 UTC)
• Platform Info:
  
  
  
  • System: Linux (x86_64-linux-gnu)
  
  
  • CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-6200U CPU @ 2.30GHz
  
  
  • WORD_SIZE: 64
  
  
  • BLAS: libopenblas (NO_LAPACKE DYNAMIC_ARCH NO_AFFINITY Haswell)
  
  
  • LAPACK: liblapack.so.3
  
  
  • LIBM: libopenlibm
  
  
  • LLVM: libLLVM-3.7.1 (ORCJIT, broadwell)
  
  

[tkelman]

What version of julia are you using? versioninfo() ?

I believe this has been fixed on 0.5.

[Vectornaut]

Thanks for the reminder, @tkelman! I'm using 0.5.0. I've added versioninfo() to the issue report.

[tkelman]

Can you give full reproduction steps? What else is in Pkg.status() ?

[Vectornaut]

@tkelman: Unfortunately, I can't reproduce, because the error hasn't come back since I restarted the REPL, and I'm not going to push my luck by trying to break my installation again.

For what it's worth, here's my current Pkg.status() output. The struck-through packages, and perhaps others as well, were not yet installed at the time I had the problem.

6 required packages:

• Compose 0.4.4
• Elliptic 0.2.0
• Gadfly 0.5.2
• Interpolations 0.3.6
• ODE 0.2.1+ master
• ValidatedNumerics 0.5.0

44 additional packages:

• AxisAlgorithms 0.1.5
• BinDeps 0.4.5
• CRlibm 0.2.3 67574177 (dirty)
• Calculus 0.1.15
• ColorTypes 0.2.12
• Colors 0.6.9
• Compat 0.9.3
• Contour 0.2.0
• DataArrays 0.3.9
• DataFrames 0.8.4
• DataStructures 0.4.6
• Distances 0.3.2
• Distributions 0.11.0
• FileIO 0.2.0
• FixedPointNumbers 0.2.1
• FixedSizeArrays 0.2.4
• ForwardDiff 0.2.5
• GZip 0.2.20
• Hexagons 0.0.4
• Hiccup 0.0.3
• Iterators 0.2.0
• JSON 0.8.0
• Juno 0.2.3
• KernelDensity 0.3.0
• Lazy 0.11.4
• Loess 0.1.0
• MacroTools 0.3.2
• Measures 0.0.3
• Media 0.2.3
• NaNMath 0.2.1
• Optim 0.6.1
• PDMats 0.5.0
• Polynomials 0.1.0
• PositiveFactorizations 0.0.2
• Ratios 0.0.4
• Reexport 0.0.3
• Rmath 0.1.4
• SHA 0.2.1
• Showoff 0.0.7
• SortingAlgorithms 0.1.0
• StatsBase 0.11.1
• StatsFuns 0.3.1
• URIParser 0.1.6
• WoodburyMatrices 0.2.0

[tkelman]

I suspect what may have happened is you might have already had Compat loaded, done a Pkg.update that upgraded it to a new version, then tried to load a package that depended on it. I think that breaks right now, and should at least be made to warn, if possible.

[Vectornaut]

That seems consistent with what I experienced.

For what it's worth, Julia just automatically recompiled my Compat and Gadfly cache files, in a freshly started REPL, with no problems. Version info is the same, and I don't think my packages have changed since my last comment.

[laurikoobas]

Ran into the same thing with Gadfly and module Measures. This issue here helped, thank you.

[fredrikekre]

Can this be closed? https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/19017#issuecomment-256463711 seems to be the solution.

[KristofferC]

This warns now.