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

From: [email-masked] (Ludovic Courtès)
Date: Tue, 10 Mar 2015 08:58:07 +0100

Tomáš Čech <[email-masked]> skribis:

> TL;DR
> I run `guix system init' from Gentoo to separate partition to
> _init_ root filesystem and after reboot to boot into GuixSD.

OK, that’s not what I had understood, so thanks for bearing with me!
;-)

>>But!  Beware that GuixSD wants to own /etc.  So in practice, when you
>>boot GuixSD, it may override most of the files in there with its own (it
>>might also bork of some of its assumptions do not hold, like if Gentoo
>>left files in /etc that it doesn’t expect to see.)  So the next time you
>>boot into Gentoo, Gentoo will basically be somewhat broken.
>>
>>IOW, using ‘guix system init’ on the current root should be thought of
>>as a one-way transition.  It’s not documented because it’s brittle and
>>it’s most likely not what you want.
>
> Yes, that would be way to hell. So the better solution can be putting
> /gnu on separate partition and share it among the systems like you can
> do for /home, /boot etc.

Possibly, yes.

> Let me the whole bug rephrase into single simple question:
>
> Shouldn't `grub' be in `%base-packages'?

It could be there; OTOH, we don’t want to encourage users to bypass
‘reconfigure’.  WDYT?

Is it really the only thing you were asking for?  If yes, I think we
could have been more efficient in our communication.  :-)

I just realized that I misread “grub store is not copied” in the title
as “/gnu/store is not copied.”  Sorry for the confusion.

Ludo’.