Subject: Re: bug#21767: Matching debug symbol and package versions

From: [email-masked] (Ludovic Courtès)
Date: Sat, 21 Nov 2015 17:56:56 +0100

Benno Evers <[email-masked]> skribis:

> assume I have installed some package
>
>     /gnu/store/xxx-daemon-1.0
>
> After a while I notice that it's inexplicably hanging, so I do 'guix
> package -i daemon-1.0:debug', attach to the daemon with gdb, and...no
> debug symbols can be loaded! Turns out, in the meantime the hash has
> changed so i installed
>
>     /gnu/store/yyy-daemon-1.0:debug

I realized that I quickly focused on the issue without looking at the
more general context.

The “in the meantime” above means that you had run ‘guix pull’ or
similar, thereby making the previous package recipe unavailable and
leaving you unable to install matching debugging symbols.

On my laptop, I typically run ‘guix package -u’ every time I do ‘guix
pull’, so I cannot find myself in a situation where I’m unable to
install debugging symbols of already installed packages.

This is just to say that the scenario described here can indeed happen,
but is probably not that common.  And I don’t mean this to be an excuse
to avoid difficult work.  ;-)

I think that the solutions I proposed are worse than the problem,
because they’re complex and would depend on external state, thus making
them look non-deterministic.

So I think I’ll punt and mark it as “wontfix.”

Thoughts?

Ludo’.