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Rescuing GNU Guix pull using an archive

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Rescuing GNU Guix build

Sometimes, especially when you run GNU Guix on a system for a longer time, the installed tools can not be updated easily with guix pull. It happens (rarely) when GNU Guix makes a not so incremental improvement. That is where GUIX-RESCUE kicks in!

You can always rescue Guix by installing a recent Guix binary tar-ball(!). This is possible because all guix software is isolated in the /gnu/store under HASH values such as:

/gnu/store/gkv8zl774h2qpa89mrf6d74fry3rsnpa-guix-0.13.0-3.b547349

It is important not to follow the standard instructions on your running system because you do not want to overwrite the existing Guix database in /var/guix. So…

What I do is keep a VM image to install the ready-made Guix binary tarball. In this VM it does not matter that the database gets overwritten (it should be possible to do the same using a container, chroot and even proot). Next I use Guix pack to create an archive which can be imported into the running Guix system. Voila - updated Guix itself!

We use the Guix archive command to create new version of Guix that can be merged into an existing system. For this we use the binary installer in a VM (hopefully this can be made easier in the future). I use Debian as the base install, but arguably this can be achieved by creating a GuixSD VM too.

Create an archive in the VM

Note: this section you only have to do once, also for future rescues

Create a VM

 guix package -i qemu

 apt-get install kvm

Run the module (it may need a bios setting changed)

 modprobe kvm-intel

and

 qemu-img create hda.img -f qed 4G
 qemu-system-x86_64 -m 1024  -cdrom debian-9.4.0-amd64-netinst.iso  hda.img

and just select defaults.

After boot into the image and login with ssh

 kvm -m 1024 hda.img  -curses -no-reboot -serial pty -redir tcp:22000::22
 ssh -p 22000 wrk@localhost

Download the binary tar ball in the VM

Find the latest and greatest on https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/download/ and download the binary tar ball for your architecture. E.g.

wget https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/guix/guix-binary-$(ver).x86_64-linux.tar.xz

Install GNU Guix

Inside the VM follow the GNU Guix binary install instructions and for running the daemon using guixbuild users. This should just take a few minutes.

Create an archive

After setting the keys in /etc/guix/acl. For reasons of convenience I use the same keys on multiple hosts. Then

/gnu/store/lqkyzawj6z3fswbj87nzyg97xkhpiwys-guix-0.15.0/bin/guix archive --export -r guix > guix.nar

Install archvive

This is the archive. Copy it from the VM to the host you need to rescue and run

guix archive --import < guix.nar

If you get

guix archive: error: build failed: program `guix-authenticate' failed with exit code 1

make sure the key is in /etc/guix/acl on the host. It looks like:

(acl
 (entry
  (public-key
   (ecc
    (curve Ed25519)
    (q #8D156F295D24B0D9A86FA5741A840FF2D24F60F7B6C4134814AD55625971B394#)
    )
   )
  (tag
   (guix import)
   )
  )
 ...

Restart daemon

/gnu/store/4lk7j5693ikj7yiw2qpsbva5vkicxmp4-guix-0.14.0-13.7af5c2a/bin/guix-daemon --build-users-group=guixbuild

Install guix

Now install guix itself again

/gnu/store/4lk7j5693ikj7yiw2qpsbva5vkicxmp4-guix-0.14.0-13.7af5c2a/bin/guix package -i guix

and we should be able to run guix pull.

guix --version
  guix (GNU Guix) 0.14.0-13.7af5c2a
guix pull

and we are up-to-date again.