bug#43739: guix archive --export broken on foreign distro

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi,

Lars-Dominik Braun <ldb@leibniz-psychology.org> skribis:

> as discussed on IRC [1][2] `guix archive --export` is currently broken on
> foreign distributions. It fails with the error message:
>
>       guix archive: error: corrupt input while restoring archive from 
> #<closed: file 7f27c396e150>
>
> strace reveals `guix authenticate` prints a message to stderr, which the
> guix-daemon does not expect:
>
>       guile: warning: failed to install locale

Specifically, the problem occurs after the change in
64cf660f872fb7aaf0d2b463e45b4c756297f743: on the first call to
‘readAuthenticateReply’, the daemon gets a “g” (from the warning above)
instead of a digit as the protocol expects.

Part of the problem is that ‘Agent’ captures stderr in addition to
stdout, which is useful for ‘guix offload’ but a bad idea for ‘guix
authenticate’.

> See also https://issues.guix.gnu.org/43737

Yup, part of the motivation came from this bug report.

Thanks!

Ludo’.