Re: Updating a very old Guix

[Julien Lepiller <julien@lepiller.eu>]

Le 2018-11-13 13:43, Konrad Hinsen a écrit :
> swedebugia <swedebugia@riseup.net> writes:
> 
>> This is most probably not correct. You most probably do have a working
>> Guix in the store but your current guix points to the new one which
>> lacks guile-gcrypt.
> 
> Indeed, kind of. It looks more complicated than that.
> 
> As you say, there is indeed a working guix in the store, but calling
> apparently still makes it use the messed-up code under ~/.config/guix.
> After renaming this to move it out of the way, I can again run guix
> commands.
> 
> However...
> 
>> I suggest you roll back your guix pull profile following the manual.
>> (this might not work if your guix is too old)
> 
> My guix does seem to be too old for that. And while I can now invoke it
> without an immediate error message, every attempt at installing or even
> removing packages leads to an attempt to compile the GCC toolchain,
> which fails for lack of disk space (there's only one 10 GB partition).
> 
> 
> So I tried Julien's suggestion to copy over a newer guix from another
> machine.
> 
> Step by step:
> 
>    guix archive --generate-key
> 
> Works fine, but must be run as root because it writes to /etc.
> 
>    scp /etc/guix/signing-key.pub remote@machine
> 
> then on the remote machine
> 
>    guix archive --authorize < signing-key.pub
> 
> Again "guix archive" must be run as root. Back to the "new-guix" 
> machine:
> 
>    guix copy --to=remote@machine `readlink -f ~/.config/guix/latest`
> 
> guix copy: error: failed to connect to `#<input-output: channel (open)
> c7ed00>': Protocol error
> 
> Hard to say which protocol is not respected there, but given how old my
> guix is, I suspect the protocol used by "guix copy" has changed since.
> 
> So let's try a variant: use "guix archive" to export a nar file, copy 
> it
> over to the other machine, and import it.
> 
>    guix archive --export `readlink -f ~/.config/guix/latest` > 
> guix-update.nar

The command you should run is:

guix archive --recursive --export `readlink -f ~/.config/guix/current` > 
guix-update.nar

note the --recursive (so guix can find its dependencies, but it will 
bundle every dependency in the .nar, so there may be some duplication 
that guix copy would have avoided), and the actual directory name is 
current, not latest (latest is the old name of the guix installation 
directory, but since we switched to full profiles for guix, we also 
renamed the directory where the current guix version is installed). I 
think I told you "latest" before, that was my mistake, sorry. Maybe you 
can try again "guix copy", with "current" this time?

> 
> guix archive: error: build failed: program `guix-authenticate' failed
> with exit code 1
> 
> There isn't much documentation on "guix authenticate" and how it might
> fail, so I'll end my experiments here. Does anyone have an idea for
> something else that I might try?
> 
> Cheers,
>   Konrad.