bug#24703: Store references in 8-byte chunks in compiled code

[Ludovic Courtès]

Török Edwin <address@hidden> skribis:

> On 2016-10-16 22:04, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
>> Mark H Weaver <address@hidden> skribis:
>> 
>>> When grafting, how will we achieve confidence that we've found the
>>> correct occurrence of the last character?  I think we will have to give
>>> up our recently added feature of being able to change the version number
>>> of grafts.
>> 
>> Wait, don’t jump to the conclusions.  :-)
>
> I've just encountered the same problem with fontconfig (after installing 
> GuixSD, running guix pull and guix system reconfigure, --no-grafts was 
> required).
> Would it be possible for the grafts to keep a symlink (somehow registered to 
> be part of the grafted fontconfig so that guix gc doesn't remove it) instead 
> of patching the binaries?
> /gnu/store/<old-hash>-fontconfig-2.11.94 -> 
> /gnu/store/<grafted-hash>-fontconfig-2.11.94

We could use a self symlink, or we could use something like
<http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/commit/?id=9d50da70608de32d9db0c29859caec6f2cddb95f>.

Mark, WDYT?

What remains to be seen is how many packages are affected by this issue,
and whether a generic solution needs to be found.

Ludo’.