Re: "guix deploy" is in git master

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Hi Jakob,

> Ricardo Wurmus <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> I tried again and it started building things but then aborted like
>this: […]
>> guix/remote.scm:66:17: In procedure %remote-eval:
>> Throw to key `srfi-34' with args `(#<inferior-object #<condition 
>> &action-exception-error [service: user-homes action: start key: match-error 
>> args: ("match" "no matching pattern" "#<<user-account> name: \"root\" 
>> password: \"\" uid: 0 group: \"root\" supplementary-groups: () comment: 
>> \"System administrator\" home-directory: #<procedure home-directory (x)> 
>> create-home-directory?: #t shell: 
>> \"/gnu/store/qn1ax1fkj16x280m1rv7mcimfmn9l2pf-bash-4.4.23/bin/bash\" 
>> system?: #f>")] 1837f00>>)'.
>>
>> Do you know what might be wrong here?
>
> Ludovic Courtès <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> I suspect the bug has nothing to do with ‘remote-eval’. Namely, if the
>> machine you’re reconfigure is running Guix from before commit
>> 6061d01512081c93c53fdd1d4302b36696403061 (March 2019), then restart
>> the ‘user-homes’ services fails with this error for obscure reasons
>> that I forgot.
>
> The throw is coming from 'upgrade-shepherd-services' making a call to
> 'start-service', so I think that Ludovic is on the right track. What
> version of Guix is the remote running, Ricardo? If it's a recent commit,
> I worry that a bad 'user-homes' service file was sent over, or perhaps
> not sent over at all...

The remote’s Guix is pretty old, so it’s likely that Ludo is right.
So, I actually reconfigured these machines semi-successfully, eh?  Neat!

> Regardless, it's undesirable to have the deployment aborted half-way
> through. Ludovic -- I've wrapped my calls to 'unload-service' in
> 'false-if-exception'.

“false-if-exception” isn’t great because it swallows the errors.  I’d
still very much like to see the errors – I just don’t want to see a
backtrace is all.

Similarly, it would be great if “guix deploy” would continue deploying
other machines in the list even if one of them couldn’t be deployed due
to an error.  I have a list of 24 machines and a few of them fail with
the user-homes error above.  Would be nice if all the other deployments
would still go through, because they are independent.

(On the other hand, the current behaviour might be desirable in case
there’s a problem with “guix deploy” itself.  Rather break just one
machine instead of wrecking the whole site.  Dunno.)

> As a side note, congratulations on being the first person to upgrade a
> machine with 'guix deploy', Ricardo!

Yay!

--
Ricardo