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civodulon Flatpak – Standalone Apps for Linux

Agreed. GNU Guix makes it easy for anyone to publish a bunch of package recipes for their own software that users just need to add to their GUIX_PACKAGE_PATH.

The benefit is that it integrates with the rest of the system and thus shares software updates, storage space, and gets overall features such as isolated builds and transactional upgrades and rollback.

civodulon Flat Tree Dependency Resolution in Npm v3

I find that Spack in fact takes very little inspiration from functional package managers, Nix and GNU Guix. Dependencies are specified in a loose fashion which, on one hand, gives a lot of flexibility, but on the other hand is detrimental to reproducibility.

More importantly, part of the dependency graph, including compilers, is treated specially and essentialy considered outside of the scope of Spack. This seriously hinders reproducibility, as we tried to explain in https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01161771/en .

civodulon Bootstrapping trust in compilers

This is one of the discussions we had at the Reproducible Builds Summit last week: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2015-12/msg001... .

In GNU Guix, we don't go as far as the author suggests (starting from a FORTH-like VM, then building a small Lisp, etc.), but we've been thinking about going in that direction: We already have Guile Scheme at the bottom, with which we can implement a range of tools, ranging from HTTP/FTP clients to ELF parsers, and more. We could imagine having (possibly feature-limited) variants of some of the bootstrap tools, written in Scheme, for the purpose of building the "real" tools.

Our current bootstrap looks like this: https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/html_node/Bootstrap... .

civodulon Environment containers in GNU Guix

Note that Guix also supports lightweight development environments in containers, via user name spaces: http://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/html_node/Invoking-g... .

This is in addition to whole-system containers: http://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/html_node/Invoking-g... .

civodulon GNU Guix 0.9.0 released – Functional package manager and distribution

Free software aims to safeguard the freedom and autonomy of computer users. I think these are important features.

civodulon GNU Guix 0.9.0 released – Functional package manager and distribution

The "substitutes" (pre-built binaries) are signed: http://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/html_node/Substitute... . We use a SPKI-style PKI: http://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/html_node/Invoking-g... .

The package recipes themselves are in a Git repo, which has signed release tags (but not signed commits.)

Lastly, the new 'guix challenge' command helps users check whether binaries provided by a server genuinely come from the source it claims to have built. See http://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/html_node/Invoking-g... .

civodulon GNU Guile site redesign

Another lot of Guix devs use GuixSD, I think. ;-)

civodulon GNU Guix 0.9.0 released – Functional package manager and distribution

As far as I know nobody has tried so far, but that would be cool.

civodulon GNU Guix 0.9.0 released – Functional package manager and distribution

Guix indeed has a strong commitment to user freedom, which makes it a different project.

Technically, I don't see it as "duplicating" Nix: Guix uses low-level parts of Nix that are awesome, and replaces higher-level layers with a more integrated and unified system. See https://arxiv.org/abs/1305.4584 for the technical rationale or the video on the home page on the concrete impact of those differences. Hacking GuixSD is a very different experience, I think!

(Disclaimer: I maintain Guix and I'm a former NixOS hacker.)

civodulon GNU Guix 0.9.0 released – Functional package manager and distribution

The future is what we make it. :-)

civodulon GNU Guix ported to ARM and other niceties of the new year

I've been using it (disclaimer: I've even been hacking on it. ;-)) The standalone Guix-based distribution uses dmd as its init system.

The way it is used, dmd itself takes care exclusively of keeping services running. Services themselves are "translated" to for dmd's configuration file from their higher-level definition (see http://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/html_node/Defining-S... ).

The nice thing is that service actions are written in Scheme so they can do anything. For instance, 'static-networking-service' at http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/tree/gnu/services/... uses directly the right ioctls to set up the network; so does 'file-system-service' at http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/tree/gnu/services/... and so on.

civodulon Boot-to-Guile

Modulo the bug at http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=15022 it's possible to dlopen symbols from the static binary.

However, all libc symbols not used by Guile are omitted from the resulting static binary, which is why the FFI is not an option. (This is independent of Guile or the libc brand.)

As for the size, the initrd is less than 5 MiB (the 'guile' binary is less than 4 MiB).