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

From: [email-masked] (Ludovic Courtès)
Date: Tue, 10 Mar 2015 11:54:53 +0100

Tomáš Čech <[email-masked]> skribis:

> On Tue, Mar 10, 2015 at 08:58:07AM +0100, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
>>Tomáš Čech <[email-masked]> skribis:

[...]

>>> 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.

As I wrote before, once you’ve booted into GuixSD, chances are that the
original distro on that partition is in a bad state because GuixSD has
fiddle with /etc and other global directories.

> 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).

Could you explain the KMS issue in a separate thread?

> 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.

It’s enough to modify grub.cfg.  GRUB itself is not needed.

But anyway, the take-home message is that if you run ‘guix system init’
on your current root, then you can assume the former distro to no longer
be bootable.

Thanks,
Ludo’.