Hello Guix, Recently I've been experiencing issues with using Guix from China. As far as working around, so far so good I guess, and the ongoing Codeberg GCD might shake things up a little, but I'm a little worried I took a route where I could lock myself out of upgrading my homes and systems later down the line.
If I could only have a reliable way to trigger a full re-clone and re-authentication of the official Guix, then I'm confident there will always be a way forward, hence most importantly there are a few questions at the end of this message. Meanwhile let's describe the situation briefly: I'm in China. In the last 2 weeks, I've been plagued with errors 502 or SSL errors when trying to guix pull %default-guix-channel from Savannah. Pulling with git pull from inside a local clone of the Savannah guix repo can yield the same error, but not repeatably so. For this Savannah vs China problem, when inside guix, using my Socks proxy is apparently unhelpful... Well, that is, unless I think I'm using it but actually I'm not because it does not work from inside guix pull. I thought I tested for that a while ago though. What may have spelled my doom in the long run, I reacted to my Savannah vs China problem by guix pulling from a local file system clone of the Guix source tree. Now I'm suffering from erratic git "object not found" errors when I guix pull. Apparently I can't even stay on a given commit of official Guix for a while because this can (but not always!) break again when I update my private channel and pull from its new HEAD. Then, when my local official Guix clone has a new commit, I can guix pull (always?) successfully again. I tried one time to pull from Codeberg but I also got "object not found" on the same object which was complained when trying to use the local file system clone. And then the last straw: this morning I noticed that when I remove the Guix source commits checkouts under ~/.cache/guix, Guix does not seem to re-clone and re-authenticate my channels from their initial commit. It used to be that I could always trigger a fresh clone from that. Now it seems that the checkouts are only anecdotally used when guix has failed because it managed to git pull some channels but not all. guix gc --verify did not find any problems with my store. Hence my questions: Was there a recent change - to guix, libgit, guile-git, ... - such that the checkouts under ~/.cache/guix/checkouts are not used by guix pull as ubiquitously as before? In normal or less-than-normal-such-as-mine circumstances, should it be considered a dangerous action to delete the cache of guix checkouts under ~/.cache/guix? What is at this time the recommended way to trigger a full re-clone and re-authentication of guix channels from an already installed system or home, if any? P-S: on the bright side, I wish to report to the mothership that the substitute server at https://mirrors.sjtug.sjtu.edu.cn/guix has recently gone from helpful in the slow hours to lightning fast and reliable day and night from pretty much everywhere I go in China. It was always nice because the default substitute servers have a lot of slow hours around here, but now it's really sweet! Whoever is taking care of that, thanks! Runciter
