NEWS

   1 Guix NEWS – history of user-visible changes.                  -*- org -*-
   2
   3 Copyright © 2013 Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org>
   4
   5   Copying and distribution of this file, with or without modification,
   6   are permitted in any medium without royalty provided the copyright
   7   notice and this notice are preserved.
   8
   9 Please send Guix bug reports to bug-guix@gnu.org.
  10
  11
  12 * Changes in 0.2 (since 0.1)
  13
  14 ** Package management
  15
  16 *** Guix commands are now sub-commands of the “guix” program
  17
  18 Instead of typing “guix-package”, one now has to type “guix package”, and so
  19 on.  This has allowed us to homogenize the user interface and initial program
  20 setup, and to allow commands to be upgradable through “guix pull”.
  21
  22 *** New “guix pull” command
  23
  24 The command pulls the latest version of Guix–both the package management
  25 modules and the distribution.  See the manual for details.
  26
  27 *** New binary substituter
  28
  29 The “substituter” mechanism allows pre-built binaries to be transparently
  30 downloaded instead of performing a build locally.  Currently binaries are
  31 available for x86_64 Linux-based GNU systems from http://hydra.gnu.org.  See
  32 the manual for details.
  33
  34 *** New “guix refresh” command
  35
  36 The command is used by Guix maintainers.  It automatically updates the
  37 distribution to the latest upstream releases of GNU software.
  38
  39 *** New “guix hash” command
  40
  41 Convenience command to compute the hash of a file.  See the manual for
  42 details.
  43
  44 *** (guix download) now supports HTTPS, using GnuTLS
  45
  46 It allows package source tarballs to be retrieved over HTTPS.
  47
  48 ** Programming interfaces
  49
  50 *** New ‘native-search-path’ and ‘search-path’ package fields
  51
  52 Packages can define in their ‘native-search-path’ field environment variables
  53 that define search paths and need to be set for proper functioning of the
  54 package.  For instance, GCC has ‘CPATH’ and ‘LIBRARY_PATH’ in its
  55 ‘native-search-path’, Perl has ‘PERL5LIB’, Python has ‘PYTHONPATH’, etc.
  56 These environment variables are automatically set when building a package that
  57 uses one of these.
  58
  59 *** Package inputs can be a function of the target system type
  60
  61 The ‘inputs’ field of a package can now be conditional on the value of
  62 (%current-system).  This is useful for packages that take system-dependent
  63 tarballs as inputs, such as GNU/MIT Scheme.
  64
  65 *** New build systems
  66
  67 The ‘perl-build-system’, ‘python-build-system’, and ‘cmake-build-system’ have
  68 been added.  They implement the standard build systems for Perl, Python, and
  69 CMake packages.
  70
  71 ** GNU distribution
  72
  73 Many updates and additions have been made to the distribution.  Here are the
  74 highlights.
  75
  76 *** Major updates
  77
  78 GCC 4.7.3 (the default) and GCC 4.8.0, Binutils 2.23.2, Guile 2.0.9,
  79 Coreutils 8.20, GDB 7.6, Texinfo 5.1.
  80
  81 *** Noteworthy new packages
  82
  83 TeXLive 2012, Xorg, GNU Parted, QEMU and QEMU-KVM, Avahi, Python, Lua, Samba.