Subject: bug#47115: Failure building grub-img.png when reconfiguring

From: Mark H Weaver <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 14 Mar 2021 18:05:48 -0400

Hi Jack,

Jack Hill <[email-masked]> writes:

> In an effort to clear out more of the potentially problematic store items, 
> I switched to an older generation of the system as well as guix pull and 
> user profiles. I then ran guix gc. At this point, I was running guix from 
> commit 373e5fc96724fd38bb1263e4af90932ea36f596b and the system profile was 
> created with guix f3eecfd36cb537a1febc30eea1f6aa448203ba40.
>
> I then pulled, bringing me up to guix 
> 8154beffd8c121e953a7c4cd75c3eebfcc073a9a. Reconfiguring results in the 
> same error. Any thoughts on how to recover? Should I try building guix 
> against an older guile version?

Rolling back to an earlier system generation and running "guix gc" again
was a good idea, but you might have missed one or two crucial steps in
between:

(1) You must *delete* the "older" system generations and user profiles
    e.g. by running "guix system delete-generations" and "guix package
    --delete-generations", or else "guix gc" won't clear them from your
    store.  It is not enough to merely switch to an older system
    generation and profiles.

(2) You'll also need to actually reboot into the older system
    generation, because /run/booted-system will continue to protect
    (from GC) the system that you last booted into, even after you
    switch systems.

Did you do those things before running "guix gc"?

I'm sorry that you've hit this nasty bug.

     Regards,
       Mark