On Tue, Sep 10, 2019 at 04:37:03PM +0200, Ricardo Wurmus wrote:

> This sounds like perhaps you ran “./configure” without
> “--localstatedir=/var”, so that Guix would be using a different
> location for its database and thus consider existing stuff in /gnu to
> be invalid.

Thank you for your prompt reply, Ricardo.

Yeah, that’s precisely what happened. I missed (or just lazily,
hastily ignored) the “Make sure to pass --localstatedir=directory”
sentence. I’m glad there exists at least an explanation for that
disaster.

Don’t you think it would be reasonable to follow that sentence with
something like: *Otherwise, you risk that the default store in `/gnu`
becomes damaged*?

> This is not a problem with using an environment.

Still, it seems to me unclear from the manual (at least as far as
14.2 is concerned) whether anything is gained by doing test builds in
an environment, and thus whether this is the recommended way, and if
so—for which steps.

WŻ