Re: Copying whole /gnu/store from USB does not work

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi!

Pjotr Prins <address@hidden> skribis:

> I thought I would be able to bootstrap using a USB image and copy
> /gnu/store to a local hard disk.

To “bootstrap,” it’s best to install Guix on top of your distro, and
build/download packages from there.  (Actually bootstrapping doesn’t
require any special action with Guix.)

> mount it with kpartx
>
>     kpartx -v -a gnu-usb-install-0.8.x86_64-linux
>     mkdir mnt 
>     mkdir tmp
>     mount /dev/mapper/loop0p1 mnt
>     cp -vau mnt/gnu tmp
>     mv tmp/gnu/ /

That cannot work.

The reason is that the store is really two things: /gnu/store, and
/var/guix/db/db.sqlite.  The latter contains meta-data about the former,
notably the list of valid store items.

The valid way to do that is with ‘guix archive’ (info "(guix) Invoking
guix archive"), or using the ‘populate-store’ and ‘register-closure’ as
is done in (gnu build vm).

HTH,
Ludo’.

PS: note that the latest version is 0.8.1, not 0.8.