guix pull: error: symlink: File exists (was: Re: [outreachy] Further steps)

[Thorsten Wilms <t_w_@freenet.de>]

On 25/10/2018 16.55, Laura Lazzati wrote:
>>> BTW, I was trying to run guix pull, the one installed on top of my
>>> foreing distro - not the one in the guix environment - and I am
>>> getting this error, don't know why, I have already run guix pull
>>> before:
>>> :~/guix$ guix pull
>>> Migrating profile generations to '/var/guix/profiles/per-user/laura'...
>>> guix pull: error: symlink: File exists:
>>> "/var/guix/profiles/per-user/laura/current-guix-1-link"
>> It seems that something is mixed up between the old and new guix pull,
>> I hope someone can provide some more insight. Ludo?
> Yes please, I need to fix this before going on.
> Here is what happened, so that I provide the full information
> After having my patch approved, I ran git pull (on master branch, of
> course, I then created branches)
> I wanted to check that everything was fine, so I ran:
> :~/guix$ guix package -s "^r" | recsel -p name description| grep '\S'
> | sort >newR.txt
> And got the output:
> Command 'recsel' not found, but can be installed with:
> sudo apt install recutils
> (which is strange, I have played with recsel before sending my
> patches, when learning guix package command)
> so i ran guix package -I, where recutils was effectively installed
> However, I tried:
> $guix package -i recutils
> guix package: warning: Your Guix installation is 13 days old.
> guix package: warning: Consider running 'guix pull' followed by
> 'guix package -u' to get up-to-date packages and security updates.
> The package was installed after those warnings, and I was asked to
> export env variables:
> export PATH="/home/laura/.guix-profile/bin${PATH:+:}$PATH"
> export INFOPATH="/home/laura/.guix-profile/share/info${INFOPATH:+:}$INFOPATH"
> Did so, but when running again:
> :~/guix$ guix package -s "^r" | recsel -p name description| grep '\S'
> | sort >newR.txt
> Got the output:
> recsel: error: cannot read file description
> And also got that error when running guix pull.

Hi, this error happened here, too, also on a foreign distro, without any 
extra steps.

---
Migrating profile generations to '/var/guix/profiles/per-user/thorwil'...
guix pull: error: symlink: File exists: 
"/var/guix/profiles/per-user/thorwil/current-guix-1-link"
---

At the same time, a `sudo guix pull` works fine.


-- 
Thorsten Wilms

thorwil's design for free software:
http://thorwil.wordpress.com/