Subject: Re: bug#35683: wishlist: addessing statefulness of .cache(s)

From: Tobias Geerinckx-Rice <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 11 May 2019 13:45:03 +0200

ehlo Giovanni,

Giovanni Biscuolo wrote:
> AFAIU unfortunately we have application/library state all over 
> .cache(s)
> that sometimes crashes software *and* trying to fix this 
> upstream it's
> _not_ an option [1]

Oh.  That's… disappointing to say the least, since these are both 
upstream bugs that Guix can't fix :-(

What exactly did you ask?  What was their response?

> often users have to delete something in some .cache by guessing, 
> "just"
> to solve some strange software crash (this is common to all 
> distros)

I have never had to do this, ever.

> maybe an activation service extension proposed by Ricardo (see 
> above)
> is the right solution: I'll try to make a summary of prevoius
> discussions on this topic on guix-devel to help address this 
> (class of)
> issue(s)... sorry I cannot help coding it

We can randomly delete whole caches in the user's stead but it's 
never the ‘right’ solution.  Only the application can manage its 
caches properly.  I still hope this is possible in both cases 
here.

Kind regards,

T G-R