On Wed, Aug 27, 2025, at 2:23 AM, Rutherther wrote: > On August 26, 2025 11:17:22 PM GMT+02:00, Zack Weinberg wrote: >># guix gc >>guix gc: error: making `var/empty' writable: Operation not permitted >> >>Well yeah! /var/empty is supposed to be empty at all times! Is this >>not how it's supposed to be? >> >># ls -ld /var/empty >>dr-xr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jul 22 2024 /var/empty/ >> >>But if I set it to be world-writable I still get the same error. In >>fact, even if I make it *owned by guix-daemon*, I still get the same >>error! > > I think that resolving the /var/guix permissions might solve this issue > as well. The error says var/empty, not /var/empty, implying it is under > whatever the guix daemon's pwd is.
The guix daemon's pwd is '/'. > Well, I unfortunately am just on > phone and since recently I decided to try update emacs on it and ended > up with emacs without git or anything, I cannot check now what file it > is actually trying to create from source like I usually would (with > search feature). I happen to have a full checkout of Guix on my workstation. The computer with all the problems was stuck on an old Guix (because unattended-upgrade failed because the store had consumed all available disk space); if I'm interpreting the contents of the old system profile correctly, it was stuck on commit b7ac124f3cfadca9a6fc9829628f84c9d9d1b27b. The string "var/empty" does not appear anywhere in the Guix source tree, except as part of "/var/empty", either on that commit or the tip of master (currently commit aad612c143e19c1a4b64ae066a1fdfbe16c71226). I'm reluctant to screw with permissions without understanding what actually went wrong here. > PS: please dont send same emails both to guix help and bug guix. This > means anyone who replies all will make a new bug report! Omitting the > fact that this bug tracker is deprecated in favor of codeberg issues, > you should rather use X-Debbugs-Cc to let debbugs send the email with > proper email address to reply to - id of the bug. So noted. zw
