Hi Guix, it happened a couple of times already that a “substitute*” expression silently failed and I only found out about it when investigating the remains of a failing build (“guix build -K”). This can easily happen when a package is updated and substitutions “anchors” no longer exist in the updated source code.
Would it be desirable to change “substitute*” (or replace it) such that it throws an error or returns a value if substitution failed? This might be helpful for the more complex packages with many substitutions. If we make it return a value (#f for error) it would also make our build phases a little prettier, I think. (Now we forcefully return #t in any case and that seems wrong.) ~~ Ricardo
