Guix

Guix welcomes Outreachy, GSoC, and Guix-HPC interns

Ludovic Courtès — 2018-04-26

We are thrilled to announce that five people will join Guix as interns over the next few months! As part of Google’s Summer of Code (GSoC), under the umbrella of the GNU Project, three people are joining us:

• Tatiana Sholokhova will work on a Web interface for the Guix continuous integration (CI) tool, Cuirass, similar in spirit to that of Hydra. Cuirass was started as part of GSoC 2016.
• uniq10 will take over the build daemon rewrite in Scheme, a project started as part of last year's GSoC by reepca. The existing code lives in the guile-daemon branch. Results from last year already got us a long way towards a drop-in replacement of the current C++ code base.
• Ioannis P. Koutsidis will work on implementing semantics similar to that of systemd unit files in the Shepherd, the “init system” (PID 1) used on GuixSD.

Through Outreachy, the inclusion program for groups underrepresented in free software and tech, one person will join:

• Sahithi Yarlagadda will work improving the user experience for the guix package command-line tool.

Finally, we are welcoming one intern as part of the Guix-HPC effort:

• Pierre-Antoine Rouby arrived a couple of weeks ago at Inria for a four-month internship on improving the user experience of Guix in high-performance computing (HPC) and reproducible scientific workflows. Pierre-Antoine has already contributed a couple of HPC package definitions and will next look at tools such as hpcguix-web, guix pack, and more.

Gábor Boskovits, Ricardo Wurmus, and Ludovic Courtès will be their primary mentors, and the whole Guix crowd will undoubtedly help and provide guidance as it has always done. Welcome to all of you!

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, x86_64 and armv7 machines. It is also possible to use Guix on top of an already installed GNU/Linux system, including on mips64el and aarch64.