bug#22039: [PATCH] 'guix system reconfigure' must start/restart/stop services

[Ludovic Courtès]

Heya,

Carlo Zancanaro <address@hidden> skribis:

> On Sat, Sep 01 2018, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
>> I’d like to make sure we understand the story with ‘EINTR-safe’, but
>> after that I’m happy to push a release.
>
> Do you have any thoughts about why it could be failing, or things I
> could investigate? I don't know where to start.

First, could you check (in a VM) whether the boot failure is
reproducible when that patch that removes ‘EINTR-safe’ is applied?

If it’s 100% reproducible, could you share the VM’s output?

I don’t know what the problem might be but hopefully that’ll give us a
starting point.

> I have done this, but now it seems a bit overwhelming how many
> services would need to be manually restarted. My modified code writes
> a message like this:

[...]

> The same list is printed every time on my system, because the diffing
> is only on the level of the canonical-name. Most of these services are
> being "replaced" by services that are exactly the same, so they don't
> really need to be restarted. I don't really know what to do about
> this, Even if it were fixed, on an actual upgrade I assume many of
> these services would be different, and thus would be printed
> legitimately.

Indeed.  In addition, some low-level services such as file system mounts
cannot be restarted without rebooting, so it’s not useful to mention
them.  Perhaps we should simply print (1) the list of services that were
restarted, and (2) a message saying that users should explicitly run
“herd restart SERVICE” to upgrade other services.

WDYT?

> I'm also confused why some of these things are services (like
> host-name).

‘host-name’ could (should?) be an activation snippet.

Thank you!

Ludo’.