113 lines
3.9 KiB
Plaintext
113 lines
3.9 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 0.2 (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 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. See
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the manual for details.
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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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*** (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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** Programming interfaces
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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 Parted, QEMU and QEMU-KVM, Avahi, Bigloo, CHICKEN,
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Scheme48, Hugs, Python, Lua, Samba.
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