Overview of Guix pull symlinks and thoroughly test it

[swedebugia]

Hi

Reading (again) about somebody being bit by the pull-bull ;-) (below)

Is there an overview of guix directories and symlinks?

Anyone got any ideas of how to thoroughly test this pull-beast to make it less brittle and erroneous?

Cheers

swedebugia

-------- Forwarded Message --------

Subject:	Re: guix pull fails while Migrating profile generations
Date:	Tue, 6 Nov 2018 20:33:54 +0100
From:	Thorsten Wilms <address@hidden>
Reply-To:	address@hidden
To:	address@hidden

Hi!

On Ubuntu, starting from
"guix pull: error: symlink: File exists: ..."

I manually removed/changed/created symlinks and had guix working again.

A few `guix pull` and `sudo guix pull` later:

---
~: guix pull
guile: warning: failed to install locale
hint: Consider installing the `glibc-utf8-locales' or `glibc-locales' package and defining `GUIX_LOCPATH', along these lines:

guix package -i glibc-utf8-locales
export GUIX_LOCPATH="$HOME/.guix-profile/lib/locale"

See the "Application Setup" section in the manual, for more info.


Migrating profile generations to '/var/guix/profiles/per-user/thorwil'...
guix pull: error: symlink: File exists: "/var/guix/profiles/per-user/thorwil/current-guix"
---

(glibc-utf8-locales is installed and GUIX_LOCPATH=/home/thorwil/.guix-profile/lib/locale is set, but that's another topic)


Now:
---
~: readlink ~/.config/guix/current
current-1-link
---

current-1-link doesn't exist!


I'm breathing manually now. I would appreciate an overview of what is supposed to sit where and where it is supposed to point to. I may have gotten something wrong ... but then again, guix working and failing again shortly after isn't exactly the outcome I'd expect in that case.


Sidenote: I wanted to try pulling as root and then choosing the same commit as user, as recently suggested:

---
~: sudo guix describe
(...)
guix: describe: command not found
---

Plain `guix describe` did work, until this linking business went wrong again.

---
~: sudo guix --version
=> 0.15.0-2.8bbb79c
---

-- 
Thorsten Wilms

thorwil's design for free software:
http://thorwil.wordpress.com/