Re: Stuck upgrading from Guix v0.12

[Konrad Hinsen <konrad.hinsen@fastmail.net>]

Hi Paul,

> A lesson learnt from a previous update process [1] was; do not leave it
> too long between 'guix pull' updates.  
>
> However, I have one system running Ubuntu 16.04 and Guix v0.12 that I
> am trying to update.  As root:

I have had similar problems as well in the past. The one recipe that has
always worked (aside from one case of a machine with very limited disk
space) is temporarily using a Guix compiled from source code.

The procedure for building Guix from source code is explained in the manual:

   https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/en/html_node/Building-from-Git.html#Building-from-Git

When done (it takes a while to compile), run that copy of Guix to do a
"guix pull", without installing it, as described in

   https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/en/html_node/Running-Guix-Before-It-Is-Installed.html#Running-Guix-Before-It-Is-Installed

After that, your standard Guix installation is up to date and you can
delete all the source code again.

The procedure is lengthy in terms of compile time, and requires a lot of
temporary disk space, but the advantage is that you don't have to
analyze what actually went wrong with your installation. Put
differently, it's hard on your computer but easy on our brain :-)

Konrad.