Subject: bug#41528: failed to compute derivation

From: Marius Bakke <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 27 May 2020 00:39:58 +0200

Marco van Hulten <[email-masked]> writes:

> Marius—
>
> On 25 May 23:54 Marius Bakke wrote:
>> Is this error consistent for you, or could it have been an
>> indeterministic failure?
>
> It happened yesterday morning and then again in the evening, so I'd
> carefully suggest it is deterministic failure.
>
>> Also, did you intentionally disable binary substitutes?
>
> Not that I know of (did just 'guix pull'), but I had been messing more
> than a month ago with 'staging' or 'core-updates' because I wanted to
> have a recent TeX Live.  I remember "core-updates" being printed when
> doing the 'guix pull' in question yesterday.
>
> Tonight I may be more precise or test more when I have access to the
> machine again.

What does 'guix describe' say?

I guess you are on a snapshot of core-updates for which substitutes are
no longer available (or never were), and Guix needs to build all the
things needed for 'guix pull' to work.

You may have earlier revisions of Guix installed that are able to 'guix
pull' without having to build the world.  Check with 'guix pull -l':
the preceding revision is likely to work since it was able to pull your
current revision.

You can then try running
'/var/guix/profiles/per-user/you/current-guix-NN-link/bin/guix pull'
directly and see if the NN generation fares better.  You might also be
able to use '/run/current-system/profile/bin/guix pull', or any other
guixen found in "/var/guix/profiles/system-*/profile/bin/guix".

This only papers over the fact that libpng fails to build on your
machine though.  It would be good to verify whether it still fails with
'guix build --no-grafts --check libpng' once you have recovered your
Guix, and try to figure out what the problem is.

Hope this helps & good luck!  :-)