Guix, If you try to use a character literal in a source 'snippet', Guix will complain about an "unsupported input". I.e. adding the following to the 'hello' package definition: (snippet '(begin #\!)) Results in: guix build: error: /home/marius/guix/gnu/packages/base.scm:73:2: package `hello@2.10' has an invalid input: #\! This is a fairly recent regression. I tracked it down to the following commit: commit 24ab804ce11fe12ff49cd144a3d9c4bfcf55b41c Author: Ludovic Courtès Date: Mon Sep 23 22:17:39 2019 +0200 gexp: Catch and report non-self-quoting gexp inputs. Previously we would, for example, generate build scripts in the store; when trying to run them, we'd get a 'read' error due to the presence of # syntax in there. * guix/gexp.scm (gexp->sexp)[self-quoting?]: New procedure. [reference->sexp]: Check whether the argument in a box is self-quoting. Raise a '&gexp-input-error' condition if it's not. * tests/gexp.scm ("lower-gexp, non-self-quoting input"): New test.