`guix pull` fails after fresh install

`guix pull` fails after fresh install

[Gabriel Wicki]

Hello Guix Community!


I ran into an issue after freshly installing Guix System.  When logged in
as a normal user, `guix pull` printed the following output:

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


`guix pull` was invoked before by root, but guix has not been called by the
unprivileged user before.


$ ls -l /var/guix/profiles/per-user/user/
total 0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 user users 19 Jul 18 22:13 current-guix -> current-guix-0-link
lrwxrwxrwx 1 user users 19 Jul 18 22:43 guix-profile -> guix-profile-2-link
lrwxrwxrwx 1 user users 51 Jul 18 22:23 guix-profile-1-link -> /gnu/store/skvmv3zpzd06pj0jq57m0xjvx0hdjnkr-profile
lrwxrwxrwx 1 user users 51 Jul 18 22:43 guix-profile-2-link -> /gnu/store/mzn60p0kd8kiwdj9qqan73664yn6b0s0-profile
-rw-r--r-- 1 user users  0 Jul 18 22:40 guix-profile.lock


I tried:

 * guix gc
 * guix gc -R
 * guix gc --referrers
 * guix gc --verify
 * guix gc --verify=repair

but to no avail.


Should I just delete current-guix?  Link it to my current profile?  Or the
system's profile?


Thanks in advance for your advice,

Gabriel

Re: `guix pull` fails after fresh install

[Gabriel Wicki]

I was able to fix it!


Because this mailing list is a resource for people seeking help I'll
feel free to describe how i tracked the issue down and fixed it.


I added a new user (through a change in the system config and `guix
system reconfigure) to figure out if the problem also exists for new
users, and if not, what the differences to my profile were.

and found the following differences:

Re: `guix pull` fails after fresh install

[Gabriel Wicki]

Please ignore my previous message in this thread, i sent the wrong
version...  Here's the right one:


I was able to fix it! Yay


Because this mailing list is a resource for people seeking help I'll
hereby take the liberty to document how I tracked the issue down and
fixed it.


I added a new user to find out if the problem was reproducible and
whether the system was to blame.  This was luckily not the case.
`guix pull` worked for the freshly added user 'test'.  But I found
the following differences: both

    /var/guix/profiles/per-user/user/current-guix

and

    /home/user/.config/guix/current

were real directories, whereas for the new 'test' user at the
corresponding paths there were symlinks: the former pointing to
current-guix-1-link in the same directory while the latter pointed to
the former.  Also, there is no file called `current-guix-0-link` in
/var/guix/profiles/per-user/user/, but `current-guix` in the same
directory points to that.  I guessed this was most probably causing
the issue.


If I understand correctly guix stores two kinds of of symlinks in
user-profiles (which live in /var/guix/profiles/per-user/):

  1. current-guix-N-link: links to guix profiles (which contain guix
and guix-daemon executables and info files),

  2. guix-profile-N-link: links to package profile generations
(which contain all installed programs including libraries,
executables and documentation)

  and for each of those link-types one special link (current-guix and
guix-profile) pointing to the currently active one of their kind.


My guix-profile links seemed to be fine, but my suspicion grew that
I'd have to replace the aforementioned directories with symlinks to 
the right places.  Only problem: I did't know which is the "right"
current-guix profile to link to.  But since my installation is just
some days old I figured there shouldn't be too much of a difference
between the different guix versions on my machine and just linked to
the one which
    /var/guix/profiles/per-user/test/current-guix-0-link
pointed to.


I tested with `guix pull` which worked just fine.  Pleased with the
outcome I happily `guix package upgrade`d my profile.