bug#59784: [version 1.4.0rc1] Retrying a failed install fails

[pelzflorian (Florian Pelz)]

Eventual success, partially.

First of all:

Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> writes:
> "pelzflorian (Florian Pelz)" <pelzflorian@pelzflorian.de> skribis:
>> Additionally, I had to do “GUIX_ALLOW_ME_TO_USE_PRIVATE_COMMIT=y
>> make update-guix-package”.  Or else the installer was using a Guix that
>> did not have the lines swapped.
> Hmm this is surprising because we’re already using (current-guix) in
> (gnu installer).

Apparently no.  If I commit only those two diffs from your mail, with
`./pre-inst-env guix system image -t iso9660 --label=Guix
gnu/system/install.scm`, then

guix gc --references /gnu/store/*-installer-real

prints a Guix package that does not contain any of the changes to
gnu/installer/final.scm.

Nonetheless I used it and ran the installer with surprising failures
that make me doubt either the health of my USB drive: `guix system
init --fallback` did not download substitutes but said ACL seems to be
uninitialized and fell back to downloading/building the tar.xz
sources.  I pulled the Ethernet plug, resumed the installer to run
`guix system init` again, but this now complains that nss-certs is an
unknown package.  Sending a dump crashed the installer.  On TTY3, `ls
/tmp` tells me '-bash: ls: command not found'.

Another USB drive, another try, the installer again says there's no
ACL and downloads tar.xz, but otherwise behaves as rc2 and sometimes
bugs out when pulling Ethernet; final.scm does not contain the patch.

Is that second diff of yours perhaps really about ACLs?

I do the authorization dance, commit the diff about 'stop-service' and
the update-guix-package, then pull --branch=version-1.4.0.  I can now
resume happily, when pulling the Ethernet and even when pressing
Ctrl-C just for fun.

Except it is necessary to resume twice.  The first resume always fails
and the second resume resumes.  Does it confuse the two databases?

Except after a large number of resumes, not even the second resume
resumes anymore.  I sent a installer-dump-c82c7abf.

I shall try with fsync now.

Regards,
Florian