Save yourself some headache and don't put JULIA_DEPOT_PATH on your NFS home directory

I have my home directory on NFS so that I have one place to back up all my files and can go from one computer to another in my house and get a consistent set of files and etc…

But Julia and especially Pkg don’t play nice with NFS home directories. Also especially not nice with glusterfs which has performance problems with file trees of large numbers of small files (which is what basically ~/.julia winds up being).

I’ve solved this problem by

export JULIA_DEPOT_PATH="/var/local/dlakelan/dotjulia"

deleted my entire ~/.julia path and then unpacked a fresh julia 1.7.1 and fired up my favorite projects and Pkg.instantiate() them (which forces re-download of all the packages into the new location which is on a fast ssd using btrfs).

Before doing this I was trying to update from 1.7.0 to 1.7.1 and it was throwing errors about git tree hashes not matching etc. It’s a headache and it’s slow, just go with the local storage… yes it does make it so it doesn’t work as well moving from one machine to another, but that’s less of a headache than trying to solve the inability to install packages and generally buggy behavior on NFS home directories.

Additional notes…

JULIA_DEPOT_PATH is not just for where packages get put etc, it’s also where julia will look for config/startup.jl and such if you like to set up your environment in a special way, make sure you put those things there.