A core tenet of science is the ability to independently verify
research results. When computations are involved, verifiability implies
reproducibility: one should be able to re-run the computations to ensure
they get the same results, at which point they may want to start
experimenting with variants of the computational methods, feed it
different data sets, and so on. This is the motivation behind our work
on Guix: we want to empower scientists by providing a tool in support of
reproducible computations and experimentation.
Static site generator is a program, which accepts text files as input
and produces static web pages as output. It can be useful in various
scenarios: for building blog, book, documentation, project or personal
page for example.
It's time to run the second Reproducible Research hackathon! The first one
was
from... 2020,
already! The date: Tuesday June, 27th. Start: 9h30 (CEST) End: 17h30.
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.