23.01.2024 16:17:48 CET Marek Paśnikowski:
> Dear All
> 
> This is my first attempt to connect to my personal Guix channel. After
> ironing out server-side inadequacies in my configuration code, I
> encountered a very resilient, cryptic error.
> 
> After one day of experimentation, where nothing I did made the error change,
> I turn to your experience and knowledge. Could I ask to take a look at my
> repository ( hosted on https://git.marekpasnikowski.pl/channel.git , branch
> wip-channel - master has incorrect parens in authorization code ) and see
> if I missed anything in the file structure?
> 
> Also, I would appreciate a confirmation whether the channel can be pulled on
> your system. I do keep in mind a possibility of a local impurity or cache
> poison.
> 
> Here is my current channels.scm:
> 
> ( list
>   ( channel
>     ( name 'guix )
>     ( branch "master" )
>     ( url "https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/guix.git" )
>     ( introduction
>       ( make-channel-introduction
>         "9edb3f66fd807b096b48283debdcddccfea34bad"
>         ( openpgp-fingerprint
>           "BBB0 2DDF 2CEA F6A8 0D1D E643 A2A0 6DF2 A33A 54FA" ) ) ) )
>   ( channel
>     ( name 'personal-channel )
>     ( branch "wip-channel" )
>     ( introduction
>       ( make-channel-introduction
>         "f8ccfe8f3e5c8bafe06665cbd4b0c9301e1a64b6"
>         ( openpgp-fingerprint
>           "590E 500F E39D 26B3 E60B 743B 6D81 B120 7711 899F" ) ) )
>     ( url "https://git.marekpasnikowski.pl/git/channel.git" ) ) )
> 
> And this is the COMPLETE build log I receive every single time:
> 
> $ zcat /var/log/guix/drvs/hg/15jjf4dr5z7lsfvcj07z2mrw69kzvp-personal-
> channel.drv.gz
> 
> (repl-version 0 1 1)
> (exception unbound-variable (value #f) (value "Unbound variable: ~S") (value
> (channel)) (value #f))

SOLVED

I am tired of still having to deal with this, so please forgive for using the 
minimal words to share the solution.



I have experimentally, in three reproduction cycles, found out the following 
"Laws of Guix Channel":

1. .guix-channel file must exist in the top directory, and must include as 
dependencies all other channels implied with (use-modules) or #:use-module in 
the file tree.

2. All .scm files in the file tree must be proper modules.

3. .guix-authorizations in the top directory is optional.

On top of this, Guix does not care if the given directory is version tracked. 
In my case, I was able to use my "secrets" directory (which is a plain, 
external subfolder), as a dependency of my channel, with no issues.



Thank you Felix, for making me aware of how to integrate the channels.scm file 
into the home-configuration data structure cleanly. I will use this 
information in future.

Thank you Clement for taking a look at my code. Even if your comments were not 
directly helpful, they were indeed a valuable input in my experimentation 
logic.



PS: If you are curious, here is a link to the code commit which documents this 
chain of error-solutions. Do note that the description chronology is reversed, 
due to git's behaviour when squashing. The referenced commits are archived in 
the museum-fix-channel-pull branch.

https://git.marekpasnikowski.pl/channel.git/commit/?
id=223caedde6ea3c4fb3a5c285a0f70ea443dd7ef0