Guix NEWS – history of user-visible changes.                  -*- org -*-

Copyright © 2013 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.

Please send Guix bug reports to bug-guix@gnu.org.


* Changes in 0.2 (since 0.1)

** Package management

*** Guix commands are now sub-commands of the “guix” program

Instead of typing “guix-package”, one now has to type “guix package”, and so
on.  This has allowed us to homogenize the user interface and initial program
setup, and to allow commands to be upgradable through “guix pull”.

*** New “guix pull” command

The command pulls the latest version of Guix–both the package management
modules and the distribution.  See the manual for details.

*** New binary substituter

The “substituter” mechanism allows pre-built binaries to be transparently
downloaded instead of performing a build locally.  Currently binaries are
available for x86_64 Linux-based GNU systems from http://hydra.gnu.org.  See
the manual for details.

*** New “guix refresh” command

The command is used by Guix maintainers.  It automatically updates the
distribution to the latest upstream releases of GNU software.

*** New “guix hash” command

Convenience command to compute the hash of a file.  See the manual for
details.

*** (guix download) now supports HTTPS, using GnuTLS

It allows package source tarballs to be retrieved over HTTPS.

** Programming interfaces

*** New ‘native-search-path’ and ‘search-path’ package fields

Packages can define in their ‘native-search-path’ field environment variables
that define search paths and need to be set for proper functioning of the
package.  For instance, GCC has ‘CPATH’ and ‘LIBRARY_PATH’ in its
‘native-search-path’, Perl has ‘PERL5LIB’, Python has ‘PYTHONPATH’, etc.
These environment variables are automatically set when building a package that
uses one of these.

*** Package inputs can be a function of the target system type

The ‘inputs’ field of a package can now be conditional on the value of
(%current-system).  This is useful for packages that take system-dependent
tarballs as inputs, such as GNU/MIT Scheme.

*** New build systems

The ‘perl-build-system’, ‘python-build-system’, and ‘cmake-build-system’ have
been added.  They implement the standard build systems for Perl, Python, and
CMake packages.

** GNU distribution

Many updates and additions have been made to the distribution.  Here are the
highlights.

*** Major updates

GCC 4.7.3 (the default) and GCC 4.8.0, Binutils 2.23.2, Guile 2.0.9,
Coreutils 8.20, GDB 7.6, Texinfo 5.1.

*** Noteworthy new packages

TeXLive 2012, Xorg, GNU Parted, QEMU and QEMU-KVM, Avahi, Python, Lua, Samba.