Hi Chris,

Christopher Baines <mail@cbaines.net> skribis:

> On Sat, 16 Sep 2017 00:02:08 +0200
> ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès) wrote:

[...]

>> Perhaps it’s due to the libtool/ltdl preload feature.
>> 
>> What’s more puzzling though, is that it works in some cases (like
>> above) and not in others (in the test VM).
>> 
>> Needs more thought…
>
> Interesting, thanks for looking in to this Ludo. I've just thought that
> this could be the cause of my problems in booting one of my GuixSD
> machines, as I am using the mysql service (with MariaDB).
>
> When you say dynamic loading is supposed not to work with a statically
> linked guile, does this mean that activation scripts should avoid using
> (ice-9 popen)? Or, given that it works some of the time, it could be
> made to work reliably...?

No I was completely on the wrong track (libguile/extensions.c, which
implements ‘load-extension’, has a mechanism to load pre-registered
extensions without going through ‘dlopen’.)

The problem is simpler: the ‘guile-static-stripped’ that’s on the store
in the initrd is not necessarily in the store on the real root file
system.  Thus, once we’ve switched roots, we look for “ice-9/popen.scm”
in a load path that’s no longer valid.

I debugged this with: