Subject: bug#46942: ci.guix.gnu.org is slow from my system

From: raid5atemyhomework <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2021 10:01:39 +0000

Hi Maxime,

> On Mon, 2021-03-15 at 00:13 +0000, raid5atemyhomework via Bug reports for GNU Guix wrote:
>
> > Hello all,
> > [...]
> > I recently had to rebuild an OS (because I was dumb; the Guix language
> > for shepherd services can easily lead you deadlocking shepherd itself)
> > and had supreme difficulty reinstalling, [...]
>
> Reinstalling after a messed up configuration file shouldn't be necessary.
> At least when using GRUB as bootloader, guix keeps some old (& presumably
> not broken) system generations around, that can be selected when booting
> from the bootloader. (I don't recall exactly how the menu is named,
> maybe ‘Old system generations of $HOSTNAMES?)

Unfortunately I had a long-standing latent bug in my configuration file that triggered on a (persistent on-disk) edge case which would cause the shepherd process to enter an infinite loop (because the shepherd configuration language is Turing-complete enough to allow infinite loops in the first place).  All the remaining generations (since I didn't like keeping more than a dozen, and had recently been excessively tweaking the configuration file) had this bug, so I had no way of reverting to an even older generation that predated the bug.

Thanks
raid5atemyhomework