244 lines
8.5 KiB
Plaintext
244 lines
8.5 KiB
Plaintext
-*- org -*-
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#+TITLE: Guix NEWS – history of user-visible changes
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#+STARTUP: content hidestars
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Copyright © 2013 Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org>
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Copying and distribution of this file, with or without modification,
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are permitted in any medium without royalty provided the copyright
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notice and this notice are preserved.
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Please send Guix bug reports to bug-guix@gnu.org.
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* Changes in 0.3 (since 0.2)
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** Package management
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*** Cross-compilation support
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Guix can now cross-build packages. On the command-line, this is achieved with
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the new ‘--target’ command-line option of ‘guix build’. At the Scheme level,
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the guts of this is the ‘package-cross-derivation’ procedure. Core packages
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of the distribution can already be cross-compiled. See the manual for
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details.
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*** New ‘--max-silent-time’ option for “guix build” and “guix package”
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See the manual for details.
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*** New ‘--fallback’ option for “guix build” and “guix package”
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This option instructs to fall back to local builds when the substituter fails
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to download a substitute.
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*** New ‘--requisites’ option for “guix gc”
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See the manual for details.
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*** New ‘--key-download’ option for “guix refresh”
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See the manual for details.
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** Programming interfaces
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*** New ‘package-cross-derivation’ procedure in (guix derivations)
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See the manual for details.
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*** New ‘%current-target-system’ SRFI-39 parameter
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This parameter is like ‘%current-system’, but for cross-compilation. It
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allows code in package definitions (such as in the ‘arguments’ field) to know
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whether it is being cross-compiled, and what the target system is.
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*** New (guix hash) module; new ‘open-sha256-port’ and ‘sha256-port’ procedures
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This improves performance of SHA256 computations.
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** GNU distribution
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*** 33 new packages
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alsa-lib, babel, cairo, cvs, gcal, gcc-cross-mips64el-linux-gnuabi64, gd,
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gdk-pixbuf, graphviz, grue-hunter, gtk+, gts, harfbuzz, imagemagick, iproute2,
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iptables, libspectre, mpg321, noweb, pango, plotutils, privoxy, pytz, racket,
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rubber, rush, strace, tk, torsocks, unrtf, vc-dwim, wordnet, xlockmore
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*** 25 package updates
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automake 1.14, ed 1.9, freeipmi 1.2.8, gawk 4.1.0, gcc 4.8.1, gettext 0.18.3,
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glib 2.37.1, gmp 5.1.2, gnutls 3.2.1, gzip 1.6, help2man 1.43.3, libapr 1.4.8,
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libaprutil 1.5.2, libassuan 2.1.1, libffi 3.0.13, libgc 7.2d, libgpg-error
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1.12, libidn 1.28, libpng 1.5.17, lout 3.40, lsh 2.1, nettle 2.7.1, qemu
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1.5.1, tzdata 2013d, xorriso 1.3.0
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*** Binary packages now available for i686-linux
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The build farm at http://hydra.gnu.org now provides 32-bit GNU/Linux binaries
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(i686-linux), in addition to the x86_64-linux binaries. Both can be
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transparently used as substitutes for local builds on these platforms.
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*** Debug info packages
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Some packages now have a “debug” output containing debugging information. The
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“debug” output can be used by GDB, and can be installed separately from the
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other outputs of the package. See “Installing Debugging Files” in the manual.
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*** Bootstrap binaries can be cross-compiled
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The distribution can now be ported to new architectures (currently
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GNU/Linux-only) by cross-compiling the “bootstrap binaries”. See “Porting”
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in the manual.
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*** Bootstrapping documented
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See “Bootstrapping” in the manual, for information on how the GNU
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distribution builds “from scratch”.
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** Internationalization
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New translations: eo, pt_BR.
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** Bugs fixed
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*** “guix --help” now works when using Guile 2.0.5
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*** Binary substituter multi-threading and pipe issues fixed
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These could lead to random substituter crashes while substituting a binary.
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See commits 0332386 and 101d9f3 for details.
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*** Binary substituter gracefully handles lack of network connectivity
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*** Daemon properly handles rebuilds of multiple-output derivations
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Previously it would fail when rebuilding a multiple-output derivation when
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some (but not all) of its outputs were already present. See
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http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-guix/2013-06/msg00038.html and
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https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/122 .
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*** ‘guix package -i foo:out’ no longer removes other outputs of ‘foo’
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Previously only the ‘out’ output of package ‘foo’ would be kept in the
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profile.
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*** Replacement (srfi srfi-37) provided if the user’s one is broken
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When the user’s (srfi srfi-37) is affected by http://bugs.gnu.org/13176 (Guile
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< 2.0.9), a replacement with the bug fix is provided. This bug would affect
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command-line argument processing in some cases.
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* Changes in 0.2 (since 0.1)
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** Package management
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*** Guix commands are now sub-commands of the “guix” program
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Instead of typing “guix-package”, one now has to type “guix package”, and so
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on. This has allowed us to homogenize the user interface and initial program
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setup, and to allow commands to be upgradable through “guix pull”.
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*** New “guix package --upgrade” option
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As the name implies, this option atomically upgrades all the packages
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installed in a profile or the set of packages matching a given regexp.
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See “Invoking guix package” in the manual.
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*** New “guix package --search” option
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Performs a full text search in package synopses and descriptions, and returns
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the matching packages in recutils format. See “Invoking guix package” in the
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manual, for details.
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*** New “guix pull” command
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The command pulls the latest version of Guix–both the package management
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modules and the distribution. See the manual for details.
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*** New binary substituter
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The “substituter” mechanism allows pre-built binaries to be transparently
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downloaded instead of performing a build locally. Currently binaries are
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available for x86_64 Linux-based GNU systems from http://hydra.gnu.org. The
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distribution is continuously built and binaries are made available from there.
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See http://hydra.gnu.org/jobset/gnu/master under “Job status” for the list of
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available binary packages.
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*** New “guix refresh” command
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The command is used by Guix maintainers. It automatically updates the
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distribution to the latest upstream releases of GNU software.
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*** New “guix hash” command
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Convenience command to compute the hash of a file. See the manual for
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details.
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*** Nix daemon code updated
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The daemon code from Nix, used by the ‘guix-daemon’ command, has been updated
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to current Nix ‘master’.
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** Programming interfaces
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*** (guix download) now supports HTTPS, using GnuTLS
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It allows package source tarballs to be retrieved over HTTPS.
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*** New ‘native-search-path’ and ‘search-path’ package fields
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Packages can define in their ‘native-search-path’ field environment variables
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that define search paths and need to be set for proper functioning of the
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package. For instance, GCC has ‘CPATH’ and ‘LIBRARY_PATH’ in its
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‘native-search-path’, Perl has ‘PERL5LIB’, Python has ‘PYTHONPATH’, etc.
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These environment variables are automatically set when building a package that
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uses one of these.
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*** Package inputs can be a function of the target system type
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The ‘inputs’ field of a package can now be conditional on the value of
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(%current-system). This is useful for packages that take system-dependent
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tarballs as inputs, such as GNU/MIT Scheme.
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*** New build systems
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The ‘perl-build-system’, ‘python-build-system’, and ‘cmake-build-system’ have
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been added. They implement the standard build systems for Perl, Python, and
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CMake packages.
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*** Tools to build Linux initrds, QEMU images, and more
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The (gnu packages linux-initrd) module provides a procedure to build a Linux
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initrd (“initial RAM disk”). The initrd embeds Guile, which is used to
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evaluate the given expression. The example below returns an initrd that
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mounts the /proc file system and starts a REPL:
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(expression->initrd
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'(begin
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(mkdir "/proc")
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(mount "none" "/proc" "proc")
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((@ (system repl repl) start-repl))))
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More examples in the linux-initrd.scm file.
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Experimental interfaces to produce and use QEMU images are provided by the
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(gnu system vm) module. For instance, the
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‘expression->derivation-in-linux-vm’ evaluates the given Scheme expression in
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a QEMU virtual machine running the Linux kernel and Guile.
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** GNU distribution
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Many updates and additions have been made to the distribution. Here are the
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highlights.
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*** Major updates
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GCC 4.7.3 (the default) and GCC 4.8.0, Binutils 2.23.2, Guile 2.0.9,
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Coreutils 8.20, GDB 7.6, Texinfo 5.1.
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*** Noteworthy new packages
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TeXLive, Xorg, GNU GRUB, GNU Parted, QEMU and QEMU-KVM, Avahi, Bigloo,
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CHICKEN, Scheme48, Hugs, Python, Lua, Samba.
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