Re: Heads-up: transition to Guile 2.2

[Pjotr Prins <pjotr.public12@thebird.nl>]

On Tue, May 09, 2017 at 11:22:05PM +0200, Ludovic Court??s wrote:
> Hello Guix!
> 
> ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Court??s) skribis:
> 
> > There???s a problem though, called ???guix pull???.  ~/.config/guix/latest
> > currently contains 2.0 .go files.  Thus after reconfiguring GuixSD to
> > use Guix-for-2.2, running ???guix??? typically gives loads of warnings like:
> >
> >   ;;; WARNING: loading compiled file /home/ludo/.config/guix/latest/guix/derivations.go failed:
> >   ;;; ERROR: In procedure load-thunk-from-memory: No such file or directory
> 
> With commit 838ba73d6e49bd2b1f2d4ed9329b65cc4e8c1f54, ???guix pull??? builds
> with the currently used Guile, be it 2.0 or 2.2.  To achieve that, it
> tries hard to pick 2.0 or 2.2 packages for the dependencies of Guix.

I have just wasted a few hours trying to find a way to
bootstrap the latest tree. And I got it to work haphazardly - that
means I can't reproduce what I did.

Starting from running 'guix pull' twice and essentially following the section
'Building GNU Guix from source (using Guix)' in

  https://gitlab.com/pjotrp/guix-notes/blob/master/INSTALL.org#building-gnu-guix-from-source-using-guix

which used to work reliably. It all has to do with the guile upgrade. Even from
a clean git clone it won't work as expected.

Typical errors during build are

  Backtrace:
    GUILEC   gnu/packages/fcitx.go
  Exception thrown while printing backtrace:
    GUILEC   ERROR: gnu/packages/figlet.go
    In procedure public-lookup: Module named (system repl debug) does
    not exist

But I got it somehow to build. guix now lacks a version number:

  ./pre-inst-env guix --version
  guile: warning: failed to install locale
    warning: failed to install locale: Invalid argument
    guix (GNU Guix) UNKNOWN

probably because bootstrap never did the right thing. Bootstrap passes, but 

  ./configure --localstatedir=/var

complains with 

  configure: error: C preprocessor "/lib/cpp" fails sanity check

And during installation:

  ERROR: In procedure stat:
  ERROR: In procedure stat: No such file or directory:
  "/gnu/store/q5kdj7gpawi94pqd15x3wizjq0nx4zhx-python-2.7.13/share/man/man1/python.1"

(I remember that one from earlier days, it is a missing symlink)

In all, the system feels flaky at this point. I wish we had found a
way of upgrading guile with backward compatibility. Maybe temporarily
naming it guile2.2 with matching paths would have been better.

Pj.