bug#27894: Building Guix fails without '/etc/services'

[Leo Famulari]

On Tue, Aug 01, 2017 at 12:09:12PM +0200, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> Leo Famulari <address@hidden> skribis:
> 
> > On a system that lacks '/etc/services' (CoreOS), building Guix from
> > source fails because getaddrinfo() doesn't know how to proceed:
> >
> > ERROR: In procedure getaddrinfo: Servname not supported for ai_socktype
> >
> > I worked around this issue by downloading the binaries by hand with
> > curl.
> 
> You get the error above when running “make”, which in turn runs
> build-aux/download.scm, right?
> 
> If so, I think this can be worked around with:
> 

> diff --git a/build-aux/download.scm b/build-aux/download.scm
> index 8dfa91460..5cb2491dc 100644
> --- a/build-aux/download.scm
> +++ b/build-aux/download.scm
> @@ -31,7 +31,7 @@
>               (guix hash))
>  
>  (define %url-base
> -  "http://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/guix/bootstrap";
> +  "http://alpha.gnu.org:80/gnu/guix/bootstrap";
>  
>    ;; Alternately:
>    ;;"http://www.fdn.fr/~lcourtes/software/guix/packages";

> 
> However, the whole point of /etc/services is so that application writers
> don’t have to hard-code port number everywhere.  So I’d be tempted to
> say this is not a bug.
> 
> WDYT?

I think it's fair to say it's not a bug. Perhaps if we get more reports
from users of this system we can reconsider.