Guix

Wrapping up Ten Years of Guix in Paris

Ludovic Courtès, Tanguy Le Carrour, Simon Tournier — 28 вересня 2022 року

Two weeks ago, some of us were in Paris, France, to celebrate ten years of Guix! The event included 22 talks and 12 lightning talks, covering topics ranging from reproducible research on Friday and Guix hacking on Saturday and Sunday.

If you couldn’t make it in Paris, and if you missed the live stream, we have some good news: videos of the talks and supporting material are now available from the program page!

If you weren’t there, there are things you definitely missed though: more than 60 participants from a diverse range of backgrounds—a rare opportunity for scientists and hackers to meet!—, impromptu discussions and encounters, and of course not one but two crazy birthday cakes (yup! on one day it was vanilla/blueberry-flavored, and on the other day it was chocolate/passion fruit, but both were equally beautiful!).

There are a few more pictures on the web site.

It might seem a bit of a stretch at first, but there is a connection between, say, bioinformatics pipelines, OCaml bootstrapping, and Guix Home: it’s about deploying complex software stacks in a way that is not only convenient but also transparent and reproducible. It’s about retaining control, both collectively and individually, over the “software supply chain” at a time when the most popular option is to give up.

We have lots of people to thank, starting with the speakers and participants: thanks for sharing your knowledge and enthusiasm, and thank you for making it a warm and friendly event! Thanks to the sponsors of the event without which all this would have been impossible.

Special thanks to Nicolas Dandrimont of the Debian video team for setting up the video equipment, tirelessly working during all three days and even afterwards to prepare the “final cut”—you rock!! Thanks to Leo Famulari for setting up the live streaming server on short notice, and to Luis Felipe for designing the unanimously acclaimed Ten Years of Guix graphics, the kakemono, and the video intros and outros (check out the freely-licensed SVG source!), all that under pretty tight time constraints. Thanks also to Andreas Enge with their Guix Europe hat on for addressing last-minute hiccups behind the scenes.

Organizing this event has certainly been exhausting, but seeing it come true and meeting both new faces and old-timers was a great reward for us. Despite the occasional shenanigans—delayed talks, one talk cancellation, and worst of all: running out of coffee and tea after lunch—we hope it was enjoyable for all.

For those in Europe, our next in-person meeting is probably going to be FOSDEM. And maybe this will inspire some to organize events in other regions of the world and/or on-line meetups!

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.