Re: guix pull: error: symlink: File exists

[Jimmy Thrasibule <jimmy.thrasibule@gmail.com>]

OK, so following the discussion at https://issues.guix.info/issue/39195, my
container was missing the $USER environment variable so Guix was failing
back to the "default" profile. Once $USER is set to "root" my current user
in this context, Guix is not complaining about the profiles anymore.

Le dim. 19 janv. 2020 à 19:54, Jimmy Thrasibule <jimmy.thrasibule@gmail.com>
a écrit :

> I tried some actions and here is what happening:
>
>
>     # ls -l .config/guix/
>     total 0
>     lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     root            45 Jan 19 18:33 current ->
> /var/guix/profiles/per-user/root/current-guix
>     # guix pull
>     Migrating profile generations to '/var/guix/profiles/default'...
>     Updating channel 'guix' from Git repository at '
> https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/guix.git'...
>     [...]
>
>
> When ``.config/guix/current`` is pointing to
> ``/var/guix/profiles/per-user/root/current-guix``, the ``guix pull``
> command will change the link to `` /var/guix/profiles/default`` or the
> other way arround.
>
> Calling ``guix pull`` again will fail:
>
>
>     # ls -l .config/guix/
>     total 0
>     lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     root            39 Jan 19 18:37 current ->
> /var/guix/profiles/default/current-guix
>     # guix pull
>     Migrating profile generations to '/var/guix/profiles/per-user/root'...
>     guix pull: error: symlink: File exists:
> "/var/guix/profiles/per-user/root/current-guix"
>
>
> The workaround is to link back the profile to ``per-user/root`` and delete
> ``/var/guix/profiles/default/current-guix*``.
>
> It is not clear why Guix is constantly swapping the profiles this way.
>
> Le sam. 18 janv. 2020 à 22:11, Jimmy Thrasibule <
> jimmy.thrasibule@gmail.com> a écrit :
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I'm working on an Alpine Docker image with the Guix package manager [1].
>> The container is building and can run Guix without the ``--privileged``
>> option.
>>
>> The installation process is based on the documentation and the
>> installation script [2]. Everything is working fine however, when I run
>> ``guix pull`` in the generated image, I got the following error:
>>
>>
>>     Migrating profile generations to '/var/guix/profiles/per-user/root'...
>>     guix pull: error: symlink: File exists: "
>> /var/guix/profiles/per-user/root/current-guix"
>>
>>
>> This issue has already been discussed at [3] but the workaround to delete
>> all the links in the directory ``/var/guix/profiles/per-user/root`` is
>> causing some troubles:
>>
>> 1. If I want to ship a ready to use image and delete the links upfront,
>> ``guix daemon`` will fail to start since ``/root/.config/guix/current`` is
>> broken.
>> 2. Users of the image can delete the links themselves but this is not
>> really friendly.
>>
>> So what is exactly causing this error and what would be a good option to
>> fix it?
>>
>>
>> [1] https://hub.docker.com/repository/docker/x237net/alpine-guix
>> [2] https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/plain/etc/guix-install.sh
>> [3] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-guix/2018-12/msg00098.html
>>
>>