Subject: bug#62023: compute-guix-derivation failed to compute the derivation for Guix

From: Maxim Cournoyer <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 09 Mar 2023 00:21:16 -0500

Hi,

Adroit <[email-masked]> writes:

> The output explicitly says "you found a bug".

Yes, thanks for reaching out.  Sadly this is something that comes up
often; a user with a failing connection can end up receiving such
advice.  We should open another bug to track this (there are many such
reports but I don't think there's a report about improving the message).

> Are you suggesting that a crash, with backtrace, is the intended
> behavior when a substitute server happens to be offline?

That's indeed a bug.  Error messages should be clear, not a backtrace
soup :-).  It seems the real underlying error is a network timeout; it's
already been reported in https://issues.guix.gnu.org/60547.

> The problem also occurs when using --no-substitutes and --fallback, so
> I'm not even sure the server is the root cause - you can see from
> first few lines (where I curl) of output that the server is indeed
> online. I also checked the web interface. The only issue I can think
> of is Guix not respecting the Gnome proxy, but in that case all of the
> servers would be seen as offline.

I'm not sure what's going on with the network, but what tipped me that
the problem was caused by a channel was this:

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
substitutes.nonguix.org: host not found: Name or service not
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

But looking more closely it seems no substitutes could be fetched at all
even from the official build farms, so it looks like your networking was
not working at that time.  Did you retry it since?  Did it work?

-- 
Thanks,
Maxim