bug#42810: Guix doesn't follow all symlinks

[Steffen Rytter Postas via Bug reports for GNU Guix <bug-guix@gnu.org>]

Hi,

ons, 16 09 2020 kl. 01:02 +0200, skrev zimoun:
> Dear,
> 
> On Tue, 11 Aug 2020 at 15:54, Steffen Rytter Postas <nc@scalehost.eu>
> wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > Some background first, to better understand the issue:
> > I've been running Guix on a foreign distribution
> > with my own channel in ~/.config/guix/channels.scm for some time
> > now. 
> > However this means having to deal with doing both a `guix pull` as
> >  a user, but also `guix pull` as superuser to keep the system
> > builder daemon etc up to date.
> > I wanted to avoid this, by using simply a system-wide guix install,
> > and
> > not have my own user have a guix variant. I tried simply deleting
> > ~/.config/guix/current symlink, and confirmed that `guix` was now
> > using
> > the `/usr/local/bin/guix` symlink.
> > Then I moved my ~/.config/guix/channels.scm file to
> > /etc/guix/channels.scm
> > and satisfied with my setup, performed `sudo guix pull --fallback`
> > to
> > pull the latest changes and verify it worked.
> > The command ran as expected, and printed the new packages from my
> > channel that were now available.
> 
> Well, I am not sure to understand why you want this setup since
> “guix-daemon” needs (really) few updates and as regular user, when
> doing
> “guix pull”, if there is major upgrade, then it will be announced
> with
> “guix pull –news”.  We all like different tastes. :-)

I also wanted to maintain only one copy of "guix" usable, instead of
having one version of guix per user, which is a lot harder to maintain.

> > `type guix`:
> > /usr/local/bin/guix
> > 
> > `readlink /usr/local/bin/guix`
> > /var/guix/profiles/per-user/root/current-guix/bin/guix
> > 
> > `/usr/local/bin/guix show entr-git`
> > guix show: error: entr-git: package not found
> > 
> > `/var/guix/profiles/per-user/root/current-guix/bin/guix show entr-
> > git`
> > name: entr-git
> > version: 4.5-0.6b13a97
> 
> [...]
> 
> So, if I understand correctly, as a regular user, the command ’guix’
> points to ’/usr/local/bin/guix’ which points to
> ’/var/guix/profiles/per-user/root/current-guix/bin/guix’, and this
> latter points to ’/gnu/store/…-guix-command’.
> 
> I think the issue is that Guix is not only one binary, so ’bin/guix’
> is
> not enough.
> 
> So you need to have also in the correct symlinks with
> ’lib/{guile,guix}’
> and others.

How would I set this up? This happens on a default Guix setup following
the standard installation guide for installing on a foreign
distribution, and then setting up the channel configuration as
mentioned.
> 
> I have not investigated but I guess the issue you hit comes from
> ’lib/guix/package.cache’, correctly see by
> /var/guix/profiles/…/bin/guix’ but not all your other symlink
> machinery.
> 

This does make sense, if that is somehow only read from a non-store
location (I'm not sure why it would be, that seems against all the
point of guix in the first place).

> 
> Well, I do not know if it helps.
> 
> All the best,
> simon
> 
> 
>