Because of the locale problems every time there is a merge, I've tried to upgrade as follows: sudo -i LC_ALL=C guix system reconfigure /etc/config.scm downloading from https://ci.guix.gnu.org/nar/lzip/532l4zja85y9c69i0l0bwnsxx98gpzdw-nss-certs-3.45... nss-certs-3.45 135KiB 104.5MiB/s 00:00 [######## ] 47.4%Backtrace: 3 (apply-smob/1 #) In ice-9/boot-9.scm: 705:2 2 (call-with-prompt _ _ #) In ice-9/eval.scm: 619:8 1 (_ #(#(#))) In guix/ui.scm: 1692:12 0 (run-guix-command _ . _) guix/ui.scm:1692:12: In procedure run-guix-command: Throw to key `encoding-error' with args `("scm_to_stringn" "cannot convert wide string to output locale" 84 #f #f)'. Can we please do something about these encoding problems once and for all? Most have standardized on UTF-8 in like 2000, so why does this keep happening? Also, what is it that changes the locale database format so fundamentally each and every time that it can't be used any more? Human culture doesn't change that quickly :P The reason I set LC_ALL=C is because with my usual language setting I cannot see where the log file is when a build failure occurs: >Das Erstellungsprotokoll kann unter â eingesehen werden. ^ You got this E-Mail right. That's what it said. That is very bad usability. If there's an official way to make these upgrades not break (automatically update in a cron job, say), is it documented in the manual how to do that? On the other hand: $ LC_ALL=de_AT.utf8 guix package -u . # With broken locales. [...] >Das Erstellungsprotokoll kann unter â eingesehen werden. ^ You got this E-Mail right. That's what it said. $ LC_ALL=C guix package -u . # With broken locales. [...] View build log at '/var/log/guix/drvs/3y/jqbvjchd344qwg62x0gbj95dx0vfk9-simple-scan-3.24.1.drv.bz2'. There it works. Furthermore, I cannot log in on the Linux console. It doesn't ask for the password and doesn't let me log in either. (I wanted to see whether the text console does the same--well, I guess we won't know)