NEWS

   1                                                               -*- org -*-
   2 #+TITLE: Guix NEWS – history of user-visible changes
   3 #+STARTUP: content hidestars
   4
   5 Copyright © 2013 Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org>
   6
   7   Copying and distribution of this file, with or without modification,
   8   are permitted in any medium without royalty provided the copyright
   9   notice and this notice are preserved.
  10
  11 Please send Guix bug reports to bug-guix@gnu.org.
  12
  13
  14 * Changes in 0.2 (since 0.1)
  15
  16 ** Package management
  17
  18 *** Guix commands are now sub-commands of the “guix” program
  19
  20 Instead of typing “guix-package”, one now has to type “guix package”, and so
  21 on.  This has allowed us to homogenize the user interface and initial program
  22 setup, and to allow commands to be upgradable through “guix pull”.
  23
  24 *** New “guix package --upgrade” option
  25
  26 As the name implies, this option atomically upgrades all the packages
  27 installed in a profile.  See “Invoking guix package” in the manual.
  28
  29 *** New “guix pull” command
  30
  31 The command pulls the latest version of Guix–both the package management
  32 modules and the distribution.  See the manual for details.
  33
  34 *** New binary substituter
  35
  36 The “substituter” mechanism allows pre-built binaries to be transparently
  37 downloaded instead of performing a build locally.  Currently binaries are
  38 available for x86_64 Linux-based GNU systems from http://hydra.gnu.org.  See
  39 the manual for details.
  40
  41 *** New “guix refresh” command
  42
  43 The command is used by Guix maintainers.  It automatically updates the
  44 distribution to the latest upstream releases of GNU software.
  45
  46 *** New “guix hash” command
  47
  48 Convenience command to compute the hash of a file.  See the manual for
  49 details.
  50
  51 *** (guix download) now supports HTTPS, using GnuTLS
  52
  53 It allows package source tarballs to be retrieved over HTTPS.
  54
  55 ** Programming interfaces
  56
  57 *** New ‘native-search-path’ and ‘search-path’ package fields
  58
  59 Packages can define in their ‘native-search-path’ field environment variables
  60 that define search paths and need to be set for proper functioning of the
  61 package.  For instance, GCC has ‘CPATH’ and ‘LIBRARY_PATH’ in its
  62 ‘native-search-path’, Perl has ‘PERL5LIB’, Python has ‘PYTHONPATH’, etc.
  63 These environment variables are automatically set when building a package that
  64 uses one of these.
  65
  66 *** Package inputs can be a function of the target system type
  67
  68 The ‘inputs’ field of a package can now be conditional on the value of
  69 (%current-system).  This is useful for packages that take system-dependent
  70 tarballs as inputs, such as GNU/MIT Scheme.
  71
  72 *** New build systems
  73
  74 The ‘perl-build-system’, ‘python-build-system’, and ‘cmake-build-system’ have
  75 been added.  They implement the standard build systems for Perl, Python, and
  76 CMake packages.
  77
  78 ** GNU distribution
  79
  80 Many updates and additions have been made to the distribution.  Here are the
  81 highlights.
  82
  83 *** Major updates
  84
  85 GCC 4.7.3 (the default) and GCC 4.8.0, Binutils 2.23.2, Guile 2.0.9,
  86 Coreutils 8.20, GDB 7.6, Texinfo 5.1.
  87
  88 *** Noteworthy new packages
  89
  90 TeXLive, Xorg, GNU Parted, QEMU and QEMU-KVM, Avahi, Hugs, Python, Lua, Samba.