Re: Newbie: Error when using "guix gc -D" to delete directory in /gnu/store

[Simon Tournier]

Hi,

On Sun, 19 Mar 2023 at 07:36, Julien Lepiller <julien@lepiller.eu> wrote:
> First of all, you don't need to delete these files. Even if they exist
> in the store, they won't be foumd by other software unless they are
> currently installed in one of your profiles. 
>
> The error you get when you try to delete them means that one of the
> generations of one of your profiles still has a reference to them. You
> should have a look at the symlinks at /var/guix/profiles to fehure out
> which profile and which generetion that is. 

For listing all your profiles, you can run:

    guix package --list-profiles

Well, you could run something like:

    for p in $(guix package --list-profiles);
    do
       echo $p;
       guix package -p $p --list-generations | grep rime-data
    ;done

so you will find in which profile you installed and removed the package
rime-data.  Then, ’guix package -p path/to/that/profile -l’ will list
all the generations.  Depending on context, you can delete the
generations containing the package rime-data; see “guix package
--delete-generations”.

Last, “guix gc -D” should work as expected.

Please note that the corollary of your annoyance is that you are still
able to switch to a specific generation of some profile containing the
package ’rime-data’ without doing anything more (download or else).

Cheers,
simon