Subject: fdisk fails to build on armhf

From: Andreas Enge <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 8 Sep 2020 13:19:39 +0200

Hello,

I am trying to build an armhf disk image on an aarch64 machine.

The build fails in this order:
genimage requires fdisk
fdisk requires guile-1.8.8 (!)
guile-1.8.8 fails two of its 16 tests:
ERROR: Value out of range -9223372036854775808 to 9223372036854775807: -9223372036854775808
FAIL: test-num2integral
fail: scm_is_signed_integer ((- (expt 2 63)), -9223372036854775808, 9223372036854775807) == 1
FAIL: test-conversion

This might be due to trying to "pseudo-cross-compile" from an aarch64 machine.
Independently, the last fdisk release dates from 2011, and relying on
guile-1.8.8 is not sustainable.

Can we phase out fdisk in Guix? Replace it by parted? Something else?
Actually genimage is the only package depending on fdisk, so if anything,
we could maybe drop this dependency, marked as
    (native-inputs
       ...
       ("fdisk" ,fdisk) ; for the tests

What do you think?

Andreas