Since I moved to Guix distribution on the 1st of January (btw, good
move), compiling cpplint@1.4.5 has always failed. More specifically,
errors are triggered by pytest during the check phase.

Some of relevant lines extracted from the log:

E   AssertionError: ('Lists differ: [\'src/chrome_content_renderer_client.cc:113[1733 chars], \'\'] != [\'pytest-cov: Failed to setup subprocess co[2001 chars], \'\']\n\nFirst differing element 0:\n\'src/chrome_content_renderer_client.cc:113[69 chars] [4]\'\n\'pytest-cov: Failed to setup subprocess co[219 chars]\\\'")\'\n\nSecond list contains 1 additional elements.\nFirst extra element 14:\n\'\'\n\nDiff is 2313 characters long. Set self.maxDiff to None to see it.', 'Failed check in /tmp/guix-build-cpplint-1.4.5.drv-0/tmpj8jqkp85/./samples/chromium-sample for command: /gnu/store/j3cx0yaqdpw0mxizp5bayx93pya44dhn-python-wrapper-3.9.9/bin/python /tmp/guix-build-cpplint-1.4.5.drv-0/source/cpplint.py  --repository /tmp/guix-build-cpplint-1.4.5.drv-0/tmpj8jqkp85 src/*')

E   AssertionError: ('Lists differ: [\'src/libvlc.c:41:  Found C system header a[51270 chars], \'\'] != [\'pytest-cov: Failed to setup subprocess co[51538 chars], \'\']\n\nFirst differing element 0:\n\'src/libvlc.c:41:  Found C system header a[91 chars] [4]\'\n\'pytest-cov: Failed to setup subprocess co[219 chars]\\\'")\'\n\nSecond list contains 1 additional elements.\nFirst extra element 602:\n\'\'\n\nDiff is 56098 characters long. Set self.maxDiff to None to see it.', 'Failed check in /tmp/guix-build-cpplint-1.4.5.drv-0/tmpj8jqkp85/./samples/vlc-sample for command: /gnu/store/j3cx0yaqdpw0mxizp5bayx93pya44dhn-python-wrapper-3.9.9/bin/python /tmp/guix-build-cpplint-1.4.5.drv-0/source/cpplint.py  --repository /tmp/guix-build-cpplint-1.4.5.drv-0/tmpj8jqkp85 src/*')

E   AssertionError: ('Lists differ: [\'src/pptable.cpp:0:  No copyright message [56843 chars], \'\'] != [\'pytest-cov: Failed to setup subprocess co[57111 chars], \'\']\n\nFirst differing element 0:\n\'src/pptable.cpp:0:  No copyright message [87 chars] [5]\'\n\'pytest-cov: Failed to setup subprocess co[219 chars]\\\'")\'\n\nSecond list contains 1 additional elements.\nFirst extra element 681:\n\'\'\n\nDiff is 60050 characters long. Set self.maxDiff to None to see it.', 'Failed check in /tmp/guix-build-cpplint-1.4.5.drv-0/tmpzqrghr8e/./samples/codelite-sample for command: /gnu/store/j3cx0yaqdpw0mxizp5bayx93pya44dhn-python-wrapper-3.9.9/bin/python /tmp/guix-build-cpplint-1.4.5.drv-0/source/cpplint.py src/*')
-

E     AssertionError: '' != 'pytest-cov: Failed to setup subprocess co[221 chars]")\n'
E     + pytest-cov: Failed to setup subprocess coverage. Environ: {'COV_CORE_SOURCE': 'cpplint', 'COV_CORE_CONFIG': ':', 'COV_CORE_DATAFILE': '/tmp/guix-build-cpplint-1.4.5.drv-0/source/.coverage'} Exception: ModuleNotFoundError("No module named 'coverage'")

A common message for all of these errors is that pytest-cov failed to
setup sub-process, probably, due to the lack of the 'coverate' module
(even though the python-pytest-cov package is listed in native-inputs).

I have tested this on several machines (all of them x86_64-linux) and on
a fresh system and the errors appear the same everywhere. I've attached
the complete log to this post.