Re: GNU Guix 0.2 released

[Xue Fuqiao]

On Mon, May 13, 2013 at 5:59 AM, Ludovic Courtès <address@hidden> wrote:
> We are pleased to announce GNU Guix version 0.2, the second alpha
> release, representing 580 commits by 5 people over 4 months.

Great news, *thanks* to everyone involved!

> • About
>
>   GNU Guix is a functional package manager and distribution of
>   the GNU system.
>
>   In addition to standard package management features, Guix supports
>   transactional upgrades and roll-backs, unprivileged package
>   management, per-user profiles, and garbage collection.  Guix uses
>   mechanisms from the Nix package management tool, with a Guile Scheme
>   programming interface.
>
>   http://www.gnu.org/software/guix/
>
>
> • Download
>
>   Here are the compressed sources and a GPG detached signature[*]:
>     ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/guix/guix-0.2.tar.gz
>     ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/guix/guix-0.2.tar.gz.sig
>
>   Use a mirror for higher download bandwidth:
>     http://www.gnu.org/order/ftp.html
>
>   Here are the MD5 and SHA1 checksums:
>
>   4bdbbd736d0bbcb6cd7e28220c4ea1fe  guix-0.2.tar.gz
>   051a65d1d7aa9a0ea69fe97d6d9a8b93fe09cca0  guix-0.2.tar.gz
>
>   [*] Use a .sig file to verify that the corresponding file (without the
>   .sig suffix) is intact.  First, be sure to download both the .sig file
>   and the corresponding tarball.  Then, run a command like this:
>
>     gpg --verify guix-0.2.tar.gz.sig
>
>   If that command fails because you don't have the required public key,
>   then run this command to import it:
>
>     gpg --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --recv-keys EA52ECF4
>
>   and rerun the 'gpg --verify' command.
>
>   This release was bootstrapped with the following tools:
>     Autoconf 2.69
>     Automake 1.13.1
>     Makeinfo 5.1
>
>
> • Changes since version 0.1 (excerpt from the NEWS file)
>
>   ** Package management
>
>   *** Guix commands are now sub-commands of the “guix” program
>
>   Instead of typing “guix-package”, one now has to type “guix package”, and so
>   on.  This has allowed us to homogenize the user interface and initial 
> program
>   setup, and to allow commands to be upgradable through “guix pull”.
>
>   *** New “guix package --upgrade” option
>
>   As the name implies, this option atomically upgrades all the packages
>   installed in a profile or the set of packages matching a given regexp.
>   See “Invoking guix package” in the manual.
>
>   *** New “guix package --search” option
>
>   Performs a full text search in package synopses and descriptions, and 
> returns
>   the matching packages in recutils format.  See “Invoking guix package” in 
> the
>   manual, for details.
>
>   *** New “guix pull” command
>
>   The command pulls the latest version of Guix–both the package management
>   modules and the distribution.  See the manual for details.
>
>   *** New binary substituter
>
>   The “substituter” mechanism allows pre-built binaries to be transparently
>   downloaded instead of performing a build locally.  Currently binaries are
>   available for x86_64 Linux-based GNU systems from http://hydra.gnu.org.  The
>   distribution is continuously built and binaries are made available from 
> there.
>
>   See http://hydra.gnu.org/jobset/gnu/master under “Job status” for the list 
> of
>   available binary packages.
>
>   *** New “guix refresh” command
>
>   The command is used by Guix maintainers.  It automatically updates the
>   distribution to the latest upstream releases of GNU software.
>
>   *** New “guix hash” command
>
>   Convenience command to compute the hash of a file.  See the manual for
>   details.
>
>   *** Nix daemon code updated
>
>   The daemon code from Nix, used by the ‘guix-daemon’ command, has been 
> updated
>   to current Nix ‘master’.
>
>   ** Programming interfaces
>
>   *** (guix download) now supports HTTPS, using GnuTLS
>
>   It allows package source tarballs to be retrieved over HTTPS.
>
>   *** New ‘native-search-path’ and ‘search-path’ package fields
>
>   Packages can define in their ‘native-search-path’ field environment 
> variables
>   that define search paths and need to be set for proper functioning of the
>   package.  For instance, GCC has ‘CPATH’ and ‘LIBRARY_PATH’ in its
>   ‘native-search-path’, Perl has ‘PERL5LIB’, Python has ‘PYTHONPATH’, etc.
>   These environment variables are automatically set when building a package 
> that
>   uses one of these.
>
>   *** Package inputs can be a function of the target system type
>
>   The ‘inputs’ field of a package can now be conditional on the value of
>   (%current-system).  This is useful for packages that take system-dependent
>   tarballs as inputs, such as GNU/MIT Scheme.
>
>   *** New build systems
>
>   The ‘perl-build-system’, ‘python-build-system’, and ‘cmake-build-system’ 
> have
>   been added.  They implement the standard build systems for Perl, Python, and
>   CMake packages.
>
>   *** Tools to build Linux initrds, QEMU images, and more
>
>   The (gnu packages linux-initrd) module provides a procedure to build a Linux
>   initrd (“initial RAM disk”).  The initrd embeds Guile, which is used to
>   evaluate the given expression.  The example below returns an initrd that
>   mounts the /proc file system and starts a REPL:
>
>     (expression->initrd
>       '(begin
>          (mkdir "/proc")
>          (mount "none" "/proc" "proc")
>          ((@ (system repl repl) start-repl))))
>
>   More examples in the linux-initrd.scm file.
>
>   Experimental interfaces to produce and use QEMU images are provided by the
>   (gnu system vm) module.  For instance, the
>   ‘expression->derivation-in-linux-vm’ evaluates the given Scheme expression 
> in
>   a QEMU virtual machine running the Linux kernel and Guile.
>
>   ** GNU distribution
>
>   Many updates and additions have been made to the distribution.  Here are the
>   highlights.
>
>   *** Major updates
>
>   GCC 4.7.3 (the default) and GCC 4.8.0, Binutils 2.23.2, Guile 2.0.9,
>   Coreutils 8.20, GDB 7.6, Texinfo 5.1.
>
>   *** Noteworthy new packages
>
>   TeXLive, Xorg, GNU GRUB, GNU Parted, QEMU and QEMU-KVM, Avahi, Bigloo,
>   CHICKEN, Scheme48, Hugs, Python, Lua, Samba.
>
>
> Please report bugs to address@hidden
>
> Ludovic, on behalf of the Guix team.

--
Best regards, Xue Fuqiao.
http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/