Guix

Meet Guix at FOSDEM

Ludovic Courtès — 2025-01-21

Next week will be FOSDEM time for Guix! As in previous years, a sizable delegation of Guix community members will be in Brussels. Right before FOSDEM, about sixty of us will gather on January 30–31 for the now traditional Guix Days!

In pure unconference style, we will self-organize and discuss and/or hack on hot topics: drawing lessons from the user & contributor survey, improving the contributor workflow, sustaining our infrastructure, improving governance and processes, writing the build daemon in Guile, optimizing guix pull, Goblinizing the Shepherd… there’s no shortage of topics!

This time we’ve definitely reached the maximum capacity of our venue so please do not just show up if you did not register. Next year we’ll have to find a larger venue!

As for FOSDEM itself, here’s your agenda if you want to hear about Guix and related projects, be it on-line or on-site.

On Saturday, February 1st, in the Open Research track:

• Guix + Software Heritage: Source Code Archiving to the Rescue of Reproducible Deployment, at noon, where Simon Tournier will talk about the latest developments connecting Guix and the Software Heritage archive.

On Sunday, February 2nd, do not miss the amazing Declarative & Minimalistic Computing track! It will feature many Guile- and Guix-adjacent talks, in particular:

• RDE: Tools for managing reproducible development environments, where Nicolas Grave will present how RDE extends Guix and what nifty features it brings;
• The Shepherd: Minimalism in PID 1, where I (Ludovic Courtès) will talk about the recently-released Shepherd 1.0 and why I think its design makes it the coolest init system to hack on;
• Shepherd with Spritely Goblins for Secure System Layer Collaboration, where Juliana Sims of Spritely will present on-going work to port the Shepherd to Goblins in support of distributed and capability-based secure computing.

But really, there’s a lot more to see in this track, starting with talks by our Spritely friends on web development with Guile and Hoot by David Thompson, a presentation of the Goblins distributed computing framework by Jessica Tallon, and one on Spritely’s vision by Christine Lemmer-Webber herself (Spritely will be present in other tracks too, check it out!), as well as a talk by Andy Wingo on what may become Guile’s new garbage collector.

Also on Sunday, February 2nd, jgart (Jorge Gomez) will be presenting a survey of Immutable Linux distributions at the Distributions track which will include RDE.

Good times ahead!

Guix Days graphics are copyright © 2024 Luis Felipe López Acevedo, under CC-BY-SA 4.0, available from Luis’ Guix graphics repository.