Re: Updating a very old Guix

[Julien Lepiller <julien@lepiller.eu>]

Le 2018-11-09 15:37, Konrad Hinsen a écrit :
> Hi everyone,
> 
> I have a computer that I don't use very often, with a rather old Guix
> installation from nearly a year ago. So I though I should do an update.
> 
> First try: "guix pull".
> 
> Does a lot of downloading and compiling, then finishes. But guix no
> longer works:
> 
>    ERROR: In procedure scm-error:
>    no code for module (gcrypt hash)
> 
> Next try: I cloned the repository under a different user account (that
> still had the old Guix). "guix environment guix", "bootstrap", and
> then "configure" get me to the error message:
> 
>   configure: error: A recent Guile-SQLite3 could not be found; please
>   install it.
> 
> But I cannot install a recent Guile-SQLite3 without doing a "guix pull"
> first.
> 
> One more option I can think of is installing everything required to
> compile Guix manually, then compile from source. Not exactly an
> attractive idea, all the more since the dependency list in the Guix
> manual looks incomplete (it doesn't mention Guile, for example, nor
> Guile-SQLite3).
> 
> Are there any other options ? I would like to avoid deleting everything
> and starting from scratch because there is one account on that machine
> that has in its Guix profile my only working installation of the only
> program I actually need this machine for.
> 
> Konrad.

If you have another machine with guix installed, you could try to use 
guix copy to copy a working guix pull profile (~/.config/guix/current) 
to that computer, and then you will be able to use that guix to run guix 
pull. Don't forget to create a key-pair on the other machine and to 
authorize the public key on the receiving end.

So on a machine with a recent guix:

guix archive --generate-key
scp /etc/guix/signing-key.pub remote@machine

On the first machine:

guix archive --authorize < signing-key.pub

On the machine with a recent guix:

guix copy --to=remote@machine `readlink -f ~/.config/guix/latest`

And finally on the machine with an old guix:

/gnu/store/.../bin/guix pull
# with ... the result of readlink on the machine with the recent guix.

Hopefully, that will work :)

See 
http://guix.info/manual/en/Invoking-guix-copy.html#Invoking-guix-copy 
and 
http://guix.info/manual/en/Invoking-guix-archive.html#Invoking-guix-archive 
for reference.