Since commit 2b0c755d195c79bfc95cdbe802e1e2dea1adb7a2 in August 2018, our 'gnome-shell' executable has been wrapped by a script that sets LD_LIBRARY_PATH.
One consequence of this, which I just noticed, is that if 'gnome-shell' is based on 'core-updates' (or in my case, 'core-updates-next'), many programs based on 'master' will fail to run within the resulting GNOME session. I ran into this issue because I recently rebuilt my Guix system based on 'core-updates-next' and booted into it, although it will take more time to finish rebuilding my user profile. Many programs, including Emacs and Nautilus, fail to launch. A workaround is to launch a terminal, unset LD_LIBRARY_PATH within the resulting shell, and then manually run the other programs from within that shell. (Since then, I've built a trimmed-down version of my profile based on 'core-updates-next'.) I was unable to easily find an existing bug report tracking this issue, so I created this one. Mark