guix/ROADMAP

-*- mode: org; coding: utf-8; -*-

#+TITLE: Tentative GNU Guix Road Map

Copyright © 2012, 2013, 2014 Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org>

  Copying and distribution of this file, with or without modification,
  are permitted in any medium without royalty provided the copyright
  notice and this notice are preserved.

The goals of the GNU Guix project are two-fold:

  - to build a purely functional package manager, based on Nix and
    Guile;

  - to use it to build a practical 100% free software distribution of
    GNU/Linux and possibly other GNU variants, with a focus on the
    promotion and tight integration of GNU components–the GNU system.

This document lists milestones toward these goals.

The timeline below was written at the end of Dec. 2012.  An updated and more
detailed list of the remaining milestones was posted at
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2013-12/msg00120.html .

The actual timeline was of course slightly different than initially
envisioned, and so was the feature set–things like cross-compilation support
and the MIPS64 port were not planned back then.  See the news section at
http://www.gnu.org/software/guix/ and ‘NEWS’ for the release history.

* GNU Guix 0.1: Jan. 2013 (was: Dec. 2012)

** basic package management facilities

Including install, upgrade, remove, roll-back, and search.

** self-contained user-land distribution

  - GNU/Linux-only, i686 and x86_64; optionally mipsel64
  - ~100 non-X11 packages

** maybe integrated Nix code

* GNU Guix 0.2: Feb./Mar. 2013

** improved package management features

  - user-environment hooks
  - sophisticated handling of collisions when building a union (package
    priorities, etc.)

** [[file:TODO::*add%20guix-pull][guix-pull tool]] to quickly update Guix and GNU for normal users
** support for fetching pre-built binaries

  - this is known as the "binary-cache substituter" in Nix parlance

** auto-update facility available for GNU packages

** more packages

  - Xorg
  - Emacs

* GNU Guix 0.9: June 2013

** bootable GNU/Linux-Libre distro
** high-level OS configuration descriptive EDSL, à la NixOS

* GNU Guix 1.0: September 2013 (GNU anniversary release)

** bootable GNU/Linux-Libre distro with non-GUI installer
** usable for a range of hacker-style uses