Guix

GNU Guix 1.3.0 released

Ludovic Courtès, Maxim Cournoyer — 2021-05-11

We are pleased to announce the release of GNU Guix version 1.3.0!

The release comes with ISO-9660 installation images, a virtual machine image, and with tarballs to install the package manager on top of your GNU/Linux distro, either from source or from binaries. Guix users can update by running guix pull.

It’s been almost 6 months since the last release, during which 212 people contributed code and packages, and a number of people contributed to other important tasks—code review, system administration, translation, web site updates, Outreachy mentoring, and more.

There’s been more than 8,300 commits in that time frame, which we’ll humbly try to summarize in these release notes.

User experience

A distinguishing Guix feature is its support for declarative deployment: instead of running a bunch of guix install and guix remove commands, you run guix package --manifest=manifest.scm, where manifest.scm lists the software you want to install in a snippet that looks like this:

;; This is 'manifest.scm'.
(specifications->manifest
  (list "emacs" "guile" "gcc-toolchain"))

Doing that installs exactly the packages listed. You can have that file under version control and share it with others, which is convenient. Until now, one would have to write the manifest by hand—not insurmountable, but still a barrier to someone willing to migrate to the declarative model.

The new guix package --export-manifest command (and its companion --export-channels option) produces a manifest based on the contents of an existing profile. That makes it easy to transition from the classic “imperative” model, where you run guix install as needed, to the more formal declarative model. This was long awaited!

Users who like to always run the latest and greatest pieces of the free software commons will love the new --with-latest package transformation option. Using the same code as guix refresh, this option looks for the latest upstream release of a package, fetches it, authenticates it, and builds it. This is useful in cases where the new version is not yet packaged in Guix. For example, the command below, if run today, will (attempt to) install QEMU 6.0.0:

$ guix install qemu --with-latest=qemu 
The following package will be upgraded:
   qemu 5.2.0 → 6.0.0

Starting download of /tmp/guix-file.eHO6MU
From https://download.qemu.org//qemu-6.0.0.tar.bz2...
 …0.tar.bz2  123.3MiB                                                                                                                      28.2MiB/s 00:04 [##################] 100.0%

Starting download of /tmp/guix-file.9NRlvT
From https://download.qemu.org//qemu-6.0.0.tar.bz2.sig...
 …tar.bz2.sig  310B                                                                                                                         1.2MiB/s 00:00 [##################] 100.0%
gpgv: Signature made Thu 29 Apr 2021 09:28:25 PM CEST
gpgv:                using RSA key CEACC9E15534EBABB82D3FA03353C9CEF108B584
gpgv: Good signature from "Michael Roth <michael.roth@amd.com>"
gpgv:                 aka "Michael Roth <mdroth@utexas.edu>"
gpgv:                 aka "Michael Roth <flukshun@gmail.com>"
The following derivation will be built:
   /gnu/store/ypz433vzsbg3vjp5374fr9lhsm7jjxa4-qemu-6.0.0.drv

…

There’s one obvious caveat: this is not guaranteed to work. If the new version has a different build system, or if it requires extra dependencies compared to the version currently packaged, the build process will fail. Yet, it provides users with additional flexibility which can be convenient at times. For developers, it’s also a quick way to check whether a given package successfully builds against the latest version of one of its dependencies.

Several changes were made here and there to improve user experience. As an example, a new --verbosity level was added. By default (--verbosity=1), fewer details about downloads get printed, which matches the expectation of most users.

Another handy improvement is suggestions when making typos:

$ guix package --export-manifests
guix package: error: export-manifests: unrecognized option
hint: Did you mean `export-manifest'?

$ guix remve vim
guix: remve: command not found
hint: Did you mean `remove'?

Try `guix --help' for more information.

People setting up build offloading over SSH will enjoy the simplified process, where the guile executable no longer needs to be in PATH, with appropriate GUILE_LOAD_PATH settings, on target machines. Instead, offloading now channels all its operations through guix repl.

The Guix reference manual is fully translated into French, German, and Spanish, with preliminary translations in Russian, Chinese, and other languages. Guix itself is fully translated in French, German, and Slovak, and partially translated in almost twenty other languages. Translations are now handled on Weblate, and you can help!

Developer tools

We have good news for packagers! First, guix import comes with a new Go recursive importer, that can create package definitions or templates thereof for whole sets of Go packages. The guix import crate command, for Rust packages, now honors “semantic versioning” when used in recursive mode.

The guix refresh command now includes new “updaters”: sourceforge, for code hosted on SourceForge, and generic-html which, as the name implies, is a generic update that works by scanning package home pages. This greatly improves guix refresh coverage.

Packagers and developers may also like the new --with-patch package transformation option, which provides a way to build a bunch of packages with a patch applied to one or several of them.

Building on the Guix System image API introduced in v1.2.0, the guix system vm-image and guix system disk-image are superseded by a unified guix system image command. For example,

guix system vm-image --save-provenance config.scm

becomes

guix system image -t qcow2 --save-provenance config.scm

while

guix system disk-image -t iso9660 gnu/system/install.scm

becomes

guix system image -t iso9660 gnu/system/install.scm

This brings performance benefits; while a virtual machine used to be involved in the production of the image artifacts, the low-level bits are now handled by the dedicated genimage tool. Another benefit is that the qcow2 format is now compressed, which removes the need to manually compress the images by post-processing them with xz or another compressor. To learn more about the guix system image command, you can refer to its documentation.

Last but not least, the introduction of the GUIX_EXTENSIONS_PATH Guix search path should make it possible for Guix extensions, such as the Guix Workflow Language, to have their Guile modules automatically discovered, simplifying their deployments.

Performance

One thing you will hopefully notice is that substitute installation (downloading pre-built binaries) became faster, as we explained before. This is in part due to the opportunistic use of zstd compression, which has a high decompression throughput. The daemon and guix publish support zstd as an additional compression method, next to gzip and lzip.

Another change that can help fetch substitutes more quickly is local substitute server discovery. The new --discover option of guix-daemon instructs it to discover and use substitute servers on the local-area network (LAN) advertised with the mDNS/DNS-SD protocols, using Avahi. Similarly, guix publish has a new --advertise option to advertise itself on the LAN.

On Guix System, you can run herd discover guix-daemon on to turn discovery on temporarily, or you can enable it in your system configuration. Opportunistic use of neighboring substitute servers is entirely safe, thanks to reproducible builds.

In other news, guix system init has been optimized, which contributes to making Guix System installation faster.

On some machines with limited resources, building the Guix modules is an expensive operation. A new procedure, channel-with-substitutes-available from the (guix ci) module, can now be used to pull Guix to the latest commit which has already been built by the build farm. Refer to the documentation for an example.

POWER9 support, packages, services, and more!

POWER9 support is now available as a technology preview, thanks to the tireless work of those who helped porting Guix to that platform. There aren't many POWER9 binary substitutes available yet, due to the limited POWER9 capacity of our build farm, but if you are not afraid of building many packages from source, we'd be thrilled to hear back from your experience!

2,000 packages were added, for a total of more than 17K packages; 3,100 were updated. The distribution comes with GNU libc 2.31, GCC 10.3, Xfce 4.16.0, Linux-libre 5.11.15, LibreOffice 6.4.7.2, and Emacs 27.2, to name a few. Among the many packaging changes, one that stands out is the new OCaml bootstrap: the OCaml package is now built entirely from source via camlboot. Package updates also include Cuirass 1.0, the service that powers our build farm.

The services catalog has also seen new additions such as wireguard, syncthing, ipfs, a simplified and more convenient service for Cuirass, and more! You can search for services via the guix system search facility.

The NEWS file lists additional noteworthy changes and bug fixes you may be interested in.

Try it!

The installation script has been improved to allow for more automation. For example, if you are in a hurry, you can run it with:

# yes | ./install.sh

to proceed to install the Guix binary on your system without any prompt!

You may also be interested in trying the Guix System demonstration VM image which now supports clipboard integration with the host and dynamic resizing thanks to the SPICE protocol, which we hope will improve the user experience.

To review all the installation options at your disposal, consult the download page and don't hesitate to get in touch with us.

Enjoy!

Credits

Luis Felipe (illustration)

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 Hurd or the Linux kernel, or it can be used as a standalone operating system distribution for i686, x86_64, ARMv7, AArch64 and POWER9 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.