bug#65178: Shepherd hangs (was: Getting Guix to shutdown my laptop properly with Sway and no DE)

[Hilton Chain]

Hello!

I have experienced many instances of Shepherd hanging through my use
of Guix, though I don't have a clear record of when it first happened.

These days I have seen a few reports on the subject.  With a quick
search of recent bug reports, I can't find any related, only to find
this thread [1] on help-guix.  So I'll start a bug report here, but I
don't know how to debug Shepherd and I haven't found a way to
reproduce it stably.

I'm not sure if Shepherd hangs at usual, but most of the time I find
it already hanging is when doing a reconfiguration.  The
reconfiguration becomes unresponsive and it won't accept a ^C, herd
actions also hang.  This usually happens with home reconfiguration,
but I can remember once with system reconfiguration when adding and
deleting some services in the configuration file.

I'm not sure how Shepherd hangs either, because in the latter case
(system one) I can still see logs indicating that it's trying to
respawn a process I killed manually, even though that's just a output
and no processes are actually spawned.

And as shown in [1], there are also cases where Shepherd hangs at some
point in the halting process, usually after syslogd has been
terminated but before term-tty*.

(The termination message indicates that Shepherd is still functional,
and no logs after that point shows that that's a real action, but
because of this I can't know anything happened further either.  After
that I'm still able to switch ttys so I assume term-tty* are alive.)

Although I don't know how they are related, I have linked my
configurations below:
<https://codeberg.org/hako/Testament/src/branch/trunk/dorphine-home.scm>
<https://codeberg.org/hako/Testament/src/branch/trunk/dorphine-system.scm>

Thanks

[1]:
<https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-guix/2023-07/msg00021.html>
(public-inbox mirror on yhetil.org)
<https://yhetil.org/guix/NZXMeM4--3-9@tutanota.com/t/#u>