Guix

We are glad to announce that four students will join GNU Guix for the 2016 Google Summer of Code (GSoC):

• Efraim will hack a Bourne-shell compiler front-end for Guile. While this may sound a bit crazy (and rather fun :-)), the motivation behind this is to help reduce the set of binaries GNU Guix relies on for bootstrapping.
• Jelle will work on an npm importer and build system for npm. This will allow users to deploy JavaScript programming environments in a controlled fashion, integrated with the rest of the system.
• Manolis, who contributed a GNU/Hurd port of Guix last year, will work on porting GuixSD to GNU/Hurd.
• Mathieu will write a continuous integration tool à la Hydra. This will improve integration with Guix and will power continuous builds of our packages.

All four projects sound exciting to us and we are happy to see progress on these fronts. Happy hacking!

About GNU Guix

GNU Guix is a transactional package manager for the GNU system. The Guix System Distribution or GuixSD is an advanced distribution of the GNU system that relies on GNU Guix and respects the user's freedom.

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 low-level mechanisms from the Nix package manager, except that packages are defined as native Guile modules, using extensions to the Scheme language. GuixSD offers a declarative approach to operating system configuration management, and is highly customizable and hackable.

GuixSD can be used on an i686 or x86_64 machine. It is also possible to use Guix on top of an already installed GNU/Linux system, including on mips64el and armv7.