Subject: Re: bug#27732: Changing display manager can render system unbootable

From: [email-masked] (Ludovic Courtès)
Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2017 15:50:07 +0200

Hello,

Marius Bakke <[email-masked]> skribis:

> When changing display manager in the system configuration and invoking
> `guix system reconfigure`, the existing desktop environment will be
> killed. If you invoked the command from within said desktop environment,
> the reconfigure command will be forcefully terminated.

Why is the desktop environment killed?

From Guix’s viewpoint, the ‘xorg-server’ Shepherd service cannot be
restarted if it’s still running (and indeed, when I run ‘guix system
reconfigure’ from my X11 + Ratpoison setup, Xorg is not killed,
fortunately.)  Same for ‘dbus-system’ etc.

I don’t know what else could be killing GNOME et al.

Thanks,
Ludo’.