Nuget package creation addentum

A short and informational blog text for once!

In preparation to some big plans™ I changed the way I generate my Nuget packages. The old way where all the metadata was specified in the .nuspec file was otherwise good, but it didn't specify version metadata for the actual DLL.

I've now changed the process so that version is specified in the .csproj file, via the VersionPrefix element. I've also defined a VersionSuffix element with a value of dev. This way when the project is built "locally" the assembly version ProductInfo field reads for example 0.1.0-dev. Whereas when the Nuget package is built I pass the option -Properties VersionSuffix=, resulting in 0.1.0. And as a side effect of moving the version element away from nuspec, I also had to also specify -Version $version, where $version is a PowerShell variable parsed from the csproj file and include a placeholder version in the nuspec file.

While slighly complex, this now allows me to fetch the version programmatically and know whether the library is an "official" release version via Nuget, or a locally compiled version with unversioned changes. I've also considered to just inject the version together with the prefix as a build step, but for now I'll try my luck with this thing that needs the assembly to reside on disk:

PS: there's a ton of unresolved issues with the Nuget CLI program, many of them several years old. When investigating the above, I also noticed that my Nuget packages don't include external libraries as dependencies even when using the option -IncludeReferencedProjects. It is a reported bug, but hasn't been fixed. One alternative might be to use dotnet pack instead of nuget pack, but I'm not sure what other changes that would entail.

InfluxDB broke, again

It is not a long time ago that I blogged about how I experienced my first fault with InfluxDB. And now it has happened again. This time a bit different, though. And much worse.

It all started with the familiar NATS alert, so I tried rebuilding the indexes again with buildtsi and thought that would be it. I was wrong.

This time there was an invalid CRC on one data block, which caused segfaults(lol) within the InfluxDB executable. Speaking of error checking... the verify command in influx_inspect has a bug. It erroneusly reports a block as healthy, because the right counter is never incremented. But anyway... The block is faulty. What now? Where is the option to fix it, or remove the block? Removing the offending file manually doesn't help.

So in the end this made me abandon the data, and start from scratch :'( And for some reason docker-compose kept doing some weird caching with the data (even when it was a filesystem mount), even after downing and removing the old container, and emptying the old data directory, and it was an effort to get everything working again...

I should probably consider upgrading the hardware. If that is the real problem. For the lulz I also asked for a quote of InfluxDB enterprise. If I cluster it, then one node can fail and it recovers, right? Right?? But I don't expect the quote to be realistic. And even if it was, it's probably still too much. One alternative might be Apache Druid. But it, too, seems a bit too young a product.