guix build gives `/homeless-shelter' exists; please remove it

guix build gives `/homeless-shelter' exists; please remove it

[Phil Beadling]

Hi Guixers,

As of last night my Guix installation (on Ubuntu) is giving the following
error when trying to fetch a URL as part of the 'guix build'.  The error
does not happen when downloading the same package using 'guix download':

*guix build: error: directory `/homeless-shelter' exists; please remove it *

It seems to make no difference what the package or or where the URL is
fetched from, I can demonstrate it with any arbitrary file on any website
I've tried so far.

However, if I use 'guix download' I am able to download the package, and
then 'guix build' works as planned, using the copy stored by 'guix
download'.

Can anyone point to where I might look to delete the homeless-shelter - or
if this is perhaps a misleading error message?

I have no idea what triggered this - my installation has worked fine for
months - the only thing I can think is that I updated the version and hash
of a package definition in my local channel just before the problem was
noticed - this may of course be coincidence.

I've tried all the obvious stuff - guix pull, bouncing the daemon, etc.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Phil

Here's one example - in order to randomly test a few download locations I
simply updated a package to download from a few locations I know to work
github, pypi, etc - here's an example - the package won't build because
it's hijacked - the point is it doesn't even download the pandas tar ball -
it fails immediately before it even downloads and expands the source.

I then replaced the URL with several other locations and got the same
result.

I also tried a few different package definitions too in case that was the
issue.


(define-public gurobipy-950
  (package/inherit gurobipy
                   (name "gurobipy-950")
                   (version "9.5.0")
                   (source (origin
                             (method url-fetch)
*                             (uri
"https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/99/f0/f99700ef327e51d291efdf4a6de29e685c4d198cbf8531541fc84d169e0e/pandas-1.3.5.tar.gz
<https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/99/f0/f99700ef327e51d291efdf4a6de29e685c4d198cbf8531541fc84d169e0e/pandas-1.3.5.tar.gz>")*
                             (sha256
                              (base32

 "17n2icl41jzkkhb4a8ksqgzqa92pqnk5xw7ackizd18nbmd2wm5v"))))))


substitute: updating substitutes from 'https://ci.guix.gnu.org'... 100.0%
substitute: updating substitutes from 'https://bordeaux.guix.gnu.org'...
100.0%
The following derivations will be built:
   /gnu/store/pvaqlg8sap0z8b2hs8a2g617vx08rxpx-gurobipy-950-9.5.0.drv
*   /gnu/store/ng2kx8hbgsvch8ssa3bvs47sn50xcddz-pandas-1.3.5.tar.gz.drv*
*guix build: error: directory `/homeless-shelter' exists; please remove it*

now if I 'guix download' the pandas package first the build will continue
without the error.

Re: guix build gives `/homeless-shelter' exists; please remove it

[Leo Famulari]

On Fri, Jan 21, 2022 at 06:50:42PM +0000, Phil Beadling wrote:
> As of last night my Guix installation (on Ubuntu) is giving the following
> error when trying to fetch a URL as part of the 'guix build'.  The error
> does not happen when downloading the same package using 'guix download':
> 
> *guix build: error: directory `/homeless-shelter' exists; please remove it *
> 
> It seems to make no difference what the package or or where the URL is
> fetched from, I can demonstrate it with any arbitrary file on any website
> I've tried so far.
> 
> However, if I use 'guix download' I am able to download the package, and
> then 'guix build' works as planned, using the copy stored by 'guix
> download'.
> 
> Can anyone point to where I might look to delete the homeless-shelter - or
> if this is perhaps a misleading error message?

So, does /homeless-shelter exist on your filesystem?

For example:

$ ls -l /homeless-shelter
ls: cannot access '/homeless-shelter': No such file or directory

If it does, that's surprising.

Re: guix build gives `/homeless-shelter' exists; please remove it

[Phil]

Leo Famulari writes:

> So, does /homeless-shelter exist on your filesystem?
>
> For example:
>
> $ ls -l /homeless-shelter
> ls: cannot access '/homeless-shelter': No such file or directory
>
> If it does, that's surprising.

Thanks Leo - indeed it was so suprising that I thought it was referring
to the root of the chroot used to build rather than just the root of
Ubuntu.

This was a bad assumption on my behalf  as /homeless-shelter really did
exist at my filesystem root (containing a single .config directory with
2 yamls in it related to the python dask package).

I moved the directory and everything is back to normal.

Even stranger the datestamp on the homeless shelter was from November
2021, so why it decided to start fail yesterday I have no idea.

Thanks again and sorry for the daft question - if I'd literally followed
the advice in the error message I'd have resolved it myself!  Way too
much overthinking on my behalf!

Re: guix build gives `/homeless-shelter' exists; please remove it

[Leo Famulari]

On Fri, Jan 21, 2022 at 09:31:57PM +0000, Phil wrote:
> Thanks Leo - indeed it was so suprising that I thought it was referring
> to the root of the chroot used to build rather than just the root of
> Ubuntu.
> 
> This was a bad assumption on my behalf  as /homeless-shelter really did
> exist at my filesystem root (containing a single .config directory with
> 2 yamls in it related to the python dask package).
> 
> I moved the directory and everything is back to normal.
> 
> Even stranger the datestamp on the homeless shelter was from November
> 2021, so why it decided to start fail yesterday I have no idea.
> 
> Thanks again and sorry for the daft question - if I'd literally followed
> the advice in the error message I'd have resolved it myself!  Way too
> much overthinking on my behalf!

It's not daft! The situation is really surprising. The only good
explanation I can think of is that guix-daemon was used the the
"--disable-chroot" option. Do you remember if you used that option?

Re: guix build gives `/homeless-shelter' exists; please remove it

[Phil]

Leo Famulari writes:

>
> It's not daft! The situation is really surprising. The only good
> explanation I can think of is that guix-daemon was used the the
> "--disable-chroot" option. Do you remember if you used that option?

I'm almost certain that option wasn't used - I know it, and it's
risky so wouldn't be inclined to run the daemon like that, but I can't
categorically rule out that I gave it a quick try.  I have root access
to the server so wouldn't need to use it.

I had previously played around with adding a single directory to the
chroot (--chroot-directory=dir) as a means of getting test XML results
out of builds of my own custom packages, but this was months ago - apart
from that I always use default settings for the daemon.

It is likely to remain a mystery alas....

Re: guix build gives `/homeless-shelter' exists; please remove it

[Leo Famulari]

On Fri, Jan 21, 2022 at 09:56:39PM +0000, Phil wrote:
> I'm almost certain that option wasn't used - I know it, and it's
> risky so wouldn't be inclined to run the daemon like that, but I can't
> categorically rule out that I gave it a quick try.  I have root access
> to the server so wouldn't need to use it.

Okay, since you know what it's about, I agree it's unlikely you used it.

> I had previously played around with adding a single directory to the
> chroot (--chroot-directory=dir) as a means of getting test XML results
> out of builds of my own custom packages, but this was months ago - apart
> from that I always use default settings for the daemon.

Hm... I suppose this is a likely candidate for explaining what happened
here.

> It is likely to remain a mystery alas....

Agreed, the details will be hard to uncover. Hopefully it was a one-off
mistake and not a bug in Guix...

Re: guix build gives `/homeless-shelter' exists; please remove it

[raingloom]

On Fri, 21 Jan 2022 17:14:06 -0500
Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name> wrote:

> On Fri, Jan 21, 2022 at 09:56:39PM +0000, Phil wrote:
> > I'm almost certain that option wasn't used - I know it, and it's
> > risky so wouldn't be inclined to run the daemon like that, but I
> > can't categorically rule out that I gave it a quick try.  I have
> > root access to the server so wouldn't need to use it.  
> 
> Okay, since you know what it's about, I agree it's unlikely you used
> it.
> 
> > I had previously played around with adding a single directory to the
> > chroot (--chroot-directory=dir) as a means of getting test XML
> > results out of builds of my own custom packages, but this was
> > months ago - apart from that I always use default settings for the
> > daemon.  
> 
> Hm... I suppose this is a likely candidate for explaining what
> happened here.
> 
> > It is likely to remain a mystery alas....  
> 
> Agreed, the details will be hard to uncover. Hopefully it was a
> one-off mistake and not a bug in Guix...
> 

Could it be a bug in package that stored the value of $HOME at build
time? Maybe it tried to mkdir -p its config directory and created
/homeless-shelter. You could perhaps try grepping for
"homeless-shelter" in your store or in that specific package.