From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name>
Subject: bug#22962: Something keeps overwriting /etc/hosts
Date: Wed, 9 Mar 2016 20:43:23 -0500
Message-ID: <20160310014323.GA29687@jasmine>
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To: Danny Milosavljevic <dannym@scratchpost.org>
Cc: 22962@debbugs.gnu.org

On Thu, Mar 10, 2016 at 12:28:11AM +0100, Danny Milosavljevic wrote:
> If I make it immutable, I get the following message on guix system reconfigure ... :
> 
>   guix system: error: copy-file: Permission denied: "/etc/hosts"
> 
> Aha!

I think that on GuixSD, the hosts file is generated from the system
configuration, specifically the 'hosts-file' field, which is mentioned
in section 7.2.2 Operating System Reference [0].

I assume that the resulting file is recreated each time you reconfigure. 

In that case, you'd want to leave the file /etc/hosts alone, and make
your changes in the operating system configuration.

I say "I think" and "I assume" because I haven't actually used
'hosts-file' yet, nor have I looked at that part of the code.

Does that help?

[0]
https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/guix.html#operating_002dsystem-Reference