Planet Guix

Making development reproducible, easy and fun with Guix

Using Guix shell to create isolated environments and containers

Let’s reflect on some of my recent work that started with understanding Trisquel GNU/Linux, improving transparency into apt-archives, working on reproducible builds of Trisquel, strengthening verification of apt-archives with Sigstore, and finally thinking about security device threat models. A theme in all this is improving methods to have trust in machines, or generally any external entity. While I believe that everything starts by trusting something, usually something familiar and well-known, we need to deal with misuse of that trust that leads to failure to deliver what is desired and expected from the trusted entity. How can an entity behave to invite trust? Let’s argue for some properties that can be quantitatively measured, with a focus on computer software and hardware:

We are delighted and somewhat relieved to announce that the third reduction of the Guix bootstrap binaries has now been merged in the main branch of Guix! If you run guix pull today, you get a package graph of more than 22,000 nodes rooted in a 357-byte program—something that had never been achieved, to our knowledge, since the birth of Unix.

About the possibility of having Windows users as clients being a software developer that doesn’t use Windows, and how to solve that technically.

Will those binaries actually work? This is a central question for HPC practitioners and one that’s sometimes hard to answer: increasingly complex software stacks being deployed, and often on a variety of clusters. Will that program pick the right libraries? Will it perform well? With each cluster having its own hardware characteristics, portability is often considered unachievable. As a result, HPC practitioners rarely take advantage of continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD): building software locally on the cluster is common, and software validation is often a costly manual process that has to be repeated on each cluster.

We are happy to announce the release of GNU Mes 0.24.2, representing 25 commits over nine months by four people.

This document is also available as PDF (printable booklet).

As has been the case for 9 years (!), Guix will be present at FOSDEM, the big annual free software developer conference in Europe. There will be no less than ten Guix-related talks, of which the following are particularly relevant to the HPC and reproducible research communities:

Layering Guix profiles and activating them at login.