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

From: Tomáš Čech <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Mar 2015 09:41:46 +0100

On Tue, Mar 10, 2015 at 08:58:07AM +0100, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
>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?

Aha! Now it makes sense!

Yes, you're right, but there is also chance that after initialization of
GuixSD and reboot you will have no way back to original distribution. I
understand that that is probably just corner case and typical Guix user
(yay! :) would just reboot to the image he used for installation...

After my installation I got into state where Guix couldn't access network so
`guix system reconfigure' was not possible and my graphic card needs some
special care during boot to make KMS work (which I was hardly googling on
tablet to fix it).

We could just add note in documentation that one can add grub as system
package as safety belt and remove it when confirmed it works. OTOH this may
encourage users to bypass reconfigure even more.

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

I'm afraid that yes. I wasn't able to say it in this simple way before as I
didn't know the reason. And yes, I'll do my best to explain it better next
time.

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

I'm glad we finally made it clear :)

Best regards,

S_W