Guix

Add a subcommand showing GNU Guix history of all packages

Magali Lemes — December 4, 2020

Hello, everyone! I'm Magali and for the next three months, I'll be an Outreachy intern in the GNU Guix community. As part of my Outreachy application process, I made my first ever contribution to Free Software adding a package to Guix, and since then I'm eager to begin contributing even more.

My task for this three-month period is to add a subcommand showing the history of all packages. Although Guix makes it possible to install and have an older version of a package, it isn't as easy to find, for example, the commit related to these versions.

The subcommand I'll implement will be something like guix git log. The idea is that, for instance, when the user invokes guix git log --oneline | grep msmtp, a list with all the commits, one per line, related to msmtp, will be shown.

In order to accomplish my task, I have to sharpen up my Scheme skills, learn more about the guile-git, which is a Guile library that provides bindings to libgit2. So, to begin with, I'll dive into the Guix code and see how commands are built.

By the end of this internship, I hope to learn much more than just programming. I also expect to gain meaninful experience and improve my communication skills.

About GNU Guix

GNU Guix is a transactional package manager and an advanced distribution of the GNU system that respects user freedom. Guix can be used on top of any system running the kernel Linux, or it can be used as a standalone operating system distribution for i686, x86_64, ARMv7, and AArch64 machines.

In addition to standard package management features, Guix supports transactional upgrades and roll-backs, unprivileged package management, per-user profiles, and garbage collection. When used as a standalone GNU/Linux distribution, Guix offers a declarative, stateless approach to operating system configuration management. Guix is highly customizable and hackable through Guile programming interfaces and extensions to the Scheme language.