Subject: bug#20024: grub store is not copied to target system

From: Tomas Cech <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 9 Mar 2015 11:34:24 +0100

On Mon, Mar 09, 2015 at 09:05:37AM +0100, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
>Tomáš Čech <[email-masked]> skribis:
>
>> On Sun, Mar 08, 2015 at 10:49:37PM +0100, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
>>>[email-masked] skribis:
>>>
>>>> With guix at revision df81e046c57e5f767738113e4e7a28b212c03d63 I tried
>>>> to deploy Guix to another partition.
>>>
>>>Do you mean that you wanted to use a different root partition than the
>>>one that was being used?
>>
>> Yes. I am running from my Gentoo `guix system init -c 3 /guix' where /guix is
>> different partition planned to be booted as root filesystem for GuixSD.
>
>OK.
>
>>>> Result system installed Grub into partition but did not copied it's
>>>> store to /gnu/store/ on target partition.
>>>
>>>Indeed, ‘guix system reconfigure’ assumes that the root partition
>>>remains the same and does not try to copy the store.
>>
>> I'm runnning `guix system init' though.
>
>Yeah your expectations for ‘guix system reconfigure’ were too high I
>guess.  ;-)

I'm afraid that I don't understand the relation between `guix system init' and
`guix system reconfigure' you insist on. My understanding was, that `guix
system init' will create new system in subdirectory as it is described in
manual (6.1.4 Proceeding with the Installation).

>Seriously, I don’t think we’d want it to automagically migrate the
>store.

How does it differ from building new VM image?

>Maybe it could check whether the root partition in the OS declaration is
>the same as the one that holds the current store, but I’m not sure if
>that can be done reliably.  Thoughts?

Again, I'm afraid we misunderstood each other.

One thing is that you can expose it to configuration and let user configure it
correctly. I was already thinking that I'm wasting disk space with two copies
of /gnu/store on my computer (on Gentoo and on GuixSD).

I may sound like Cpt. Obvious here, but you can also be sure that store is
elsewhere if you need to create /gnu/store directory...

And also note that it worked for me for every package but grub. My opinion is
that grub binaries are not part of %base-packages or similar package set and
noone noticed until now because grub was installed from different
distribution.

I hope I made it a bit more clear now.

Best regards and thanks,

S_W