Re: Too many levels of symbolic links

[Felix Lechner via <help-guix@gnu.org>]

Hi Roman,

On Fri, Mar 10, 2023 at 7:32 AM Roman Scherer
<roman.scherer@burningswell.com> wrote:
>
> Right now I rolled back to generation 53, which is still
> working.

Great!

> Is it correct to look for the problematic files in the directory to
> which system-54-link links to?

Yes, probably. Unfortunately, profiles are large bundles of symbolic
links, so finding the offending cycle may not be easy.

> Generation 54 is the broken one, which does boot up, but
> logging in fails with the too many levels of symbolic link issue.

Since the issue occurs at login, there may also be a bad interaction
with your user profile. What if you log in as another user?

> I run the problematic commands from that directory and they seem to run
> from the non-broken system

My prime list of suspects include something like a system-wide Bash
profile (or whichever shell you use).

> I'm thinking of re-installing my system completely.

Please don't do that. It is not necessary.

Instead, you can delete generation 54 and try again. Make sure to
'guix pull' before reconfiguring again.

> Do I have any other option, even an unsupported one?

Please post the config.scm for your generation 53, plus a diff to
generation 54. You find copies via 'guix system describe'. It may also
be helpful to attach your home.scm, if you use Guix Home.

Together with the changes in Guix since the commit on which generation
53 is based, we will find the issue. The process is more or less
deterministic.

Please keep up hope. All needed software is already installed. Guix
has extraordinary ways to recover—even though they can be hard to
figure out.

Kind regards
Felix