-*- org -*- #+TITLE: Guix NEWS – history of user-visible changes #+STARTUP: content hidestars Copyright © 2013 Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> Copying and distribution of this file, with or without modification, are permitted in any medium without royalty provided the copyright notice and this notice are preserved. Please send Guix bug reports to bug-guix@gnu.org. * Changes in 0.3 (since 0.2) ** Package management *** Cross-compilation support Guix can now cross-build packages. On the command-line, this is achieved with the new ‘--target’ command-line option of ‘guix build’. At the Scheme level, the guts of this is the ‘package-cross-derivation’ procedure. Core packages of the distribution can already be cross-compiled. See the manual for details. *** New ‘--max-silent-time’ option for “guix build” and “guix package” See the manual for details. *** New ‘--fallback’ option for “guix build” and “guix package” This option instructs to fall back to local builds when the substituter fails to download a substitute. *** New ‘--requisites’ option for “guix gc” See the manual for details. *** New ‘--key-download’ option for “guix refresh” See the manual for details. ** Programming interfaces *** New ‘package-cross-derivation’ procedure in (guix derivations) See the manual for details. *** New ‘%current-target-system’ SRFI-39 parameter This parameter is like ‘%current-system’, but for cross-compilation. It allows code in package definitions (such as in the ‘arguments’ field) to know whether it is being cross-compiled, and what the target system is. *** New (guix hash) module; new ‘open-sha256-port’ and ‘sha256-port’ procedures This improves performance of SHA256 computations. ** GNU distribution *** 33 new packages alsa-lib, babel, cairo, cvs, gcal, gcc-cross-mips64el-linux-gnuabi64, gd, gdk-pixbuf, graphviz, grue-hunter, gtk+, gts, harfbuzz, imagemagick, iproute2, iptables, libspectre, mpg321, noweb, pango, plotutils, privoxy, pytz, racket, rubber, rush, strace, tk, torsocks, unrtf, vc-dwim, wordnet, xlockmore *** 25 package updates automake 1.14, ed 1.9, freeipmi 1.2.8, gawk 4.1.0, gcc 4.8.1, gettext 0.18.3, glib 2.37.1, gmp 5.1.2, gnutls 3.2.1, gzip 1.6, help2man 1.43.3, libapr 1.4.8, libaprutil 1.5.2, libassuan 2.1.1, libffi 3.0.13, libgc 7.2d, libgpg-error 1.12, libidn 1.28, libpng 1.5.17, lout 3.40, lsh 2.1, nettle 2.7.1, qemu 1.5.1, tzdata 2013d, xorriso 1.3.0 *** Binary packages now available for i686-linux The build farm at http://hydra.gnu.org now provides 32-bit GNU/Linux binaries (i686-linux), in addition to the x86_64-linux binaries. Both can be transparently used as substitutes for local builds on these platforms. *** Debug info packages Some packages now have a “debug” output containing debugging information. The “debug” output can be used by GDB, and can be installed separately from the other outputs of the package. See “Installing Debugging Files” in the manual. *** Bootstrap binaries can be cross-compiled The distribution can now be ported to new architectures (currently GNU/Linux-only) by cross-compiling the “bootstrap binaries”. See “Porting” in the manual. *** Bootstrapping documented See “Bootstrapping” in the manual, for information on how the GNU distribution builds “from scratch”. ** Internationalization New translations: eo, pt_BR. ** Bugs fixed *** “guix --help” now works when using Guile 2.0.5 *** Binary substituter multi-threading and pipe issues fixed These could lead to random substituter crashes while substituting a binary. See commits 0332386 and 101d9f3 for details. *** Binary substituter gracefully handles lack of network connectivity *** Daemon properly handles rebuilds of multiple-output derivations Previously it would fail when rebuilding a multiple-output derivation when some (but not all) of its outputs were already present. See http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-guix/2013-06/msg00038.html and https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/122 . *** ‘guix package -i foo:out’ no longer removes other outputs of ‘foo’ Previously only the ‘out’ output of package ‘foo’ would be kept in the profile. *** Replacement (srfi srfi-37) provided if the user’s one is broken When the user’s (srfi srfi-37) is affected by http://bugs.gnu.org/13176 (Guile < 2.0.9), a replacement with the bug fix is provided. This bug would affect command-line argument processing in some cases. * Changes in 0.2 (since 0.1) ** 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.