bug#49985: bash-mesboot0: Inscrutable error in build phase

[Carl Dong]

Hi all,

While setting up Guix for a community member of mine, we encountered this 
somewhat inscrutable problem (I later learned this is not the first time Guix 
users have run into this problem!). When building 
/gnu/store/2nvaxgs0rdxfkrwklh622ggaxg0wap6n-bash-mesboot0-2.05b.drv, we 
encountered the following build failure: 
https://paste.sr.ht/~dongcarl/376b19b8349c329ed5329508c7fb43a7c3aec64b#2nvaxgs0rdxfkrwklh622ggaxg0wap6n-bash-mesboot0-2.05b.log-L1299

The error line is L1299: "make: stat:Makefile: sterror: unknown error”

This failure persists even when ran with --cores=1, across reboots. I’ve even 
tried building that derivation with --check on my own machine (which 
successfully built that derivation), and every log line matched (plus or minus 
some timing log lines) up until L1299.

We’ve also tried rebuilding bash-mesboot0-2.05b.drv’s dependency 
/gnu/store/2nvaxgs0rdxfkrwklh622ggaxg0wap6n-bash-mesboot0-2.05b.drv with:

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
guix gc --delete /gnu/store/prkqai3zwh3shlqpll6xyncmmqpj49dd-gash-boot-0.2.0
guix build --cores=1 
/gnu/store/2nvaxgs0rdxfkrwklh622ggaxg0wap6n-bash-mesboot0-2.05b.drv
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

Which did not make a difference.

What is interesting is that this is not the first time this problem has cropped 
up for people. I see 2 past mentions of this exact error:
- Mentioned by kagevf on Dec 16th, 2020: 
https://logs.guix.gnu.org/guix/2020-12-16.log#043712
- Mentioned by genr8_ (with help from rekado_) on Mar 22nd, 2021: 
https://logs.guix.gnu.org/guix/2021-03-22.log#182406

I’m happy to spend energy investigating, but would love any pointers on what 
the most promising place to look is!

My friend's system is an Intel i5 system, running Guix 1.3.0 on Ubuntu. His 
/tmp is on the same partition as / and is ext4.

Cheers,
Carl Dong
contact@carldong.me
"I fight for the users"