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 or the set of packages matching a given regexp.
  28 See “Invoking guix package” in the manual.
  29
  30 *** New “guix package --search” option
  31
  32 Performs a full text search in package synopses and descriptions, and returns
  33 the matching packages in recutils format.  See “Invoking guix package” in the
  34 manual, for details.
  35
  36 *** New “guix pull” command
  37
  38 The command pulls the latest version of Guix–both the package management
  39 modules and the distribution.  See the manual for details.
  40
  41 *** New binary substituter
  42
  43 The “substituter” mechanism allows pre-built binaries to be transparently
  44 downloaded instead of performing a build locally.  Currently binaries are
  45 available for x86_64 Linux-based GNU systems from http://hydra.gnu.org.  The
  46 distribution is continuously built and binaries are made available from there.
  47
  48 See http://hydra.gnu.org/jobset/gnu/master under “Job status” for the list of
  49 available binary packages.
  50
  51 *** New “guix refresh” command
  52
  53 The command is used by Guix maintainers.  It automatically updates the
  54 distribution to the latest upstream releases of GNU software.
  55
  56 *** New “guix hash” command
  57
  58 Convenience command to compute the hash of a file.  See the manual for
  59 details.
  60
  61 *** Nix daemon code updated
  62
  63 The daemon code from Nix, used by the ‘guix-daemon’ command, has been updated
  64 to current Nix ‘master’.
  65
  66 ** Programming interfaces
  67
  68 *** (guix download) now supports HTTPS, using GnuTLS
  69
  70 It allows package source tarballs to be retrieved over HTTPS.
  71
  72 *** New ‘native-search-path’ and ‘search-path’ package fields
  73
  74 Packages can define in their ‘native-search-path’ field environment variables
  75 that define search paths and need to be set for proper functioning of the
  76 package.  For instance, GCC has ‘CPATH’ and ‘LIBRARY_PATH’ in its
  77 ‘native-search-path’, Perl has ‘PERL5LIB’, Python has ‘PYTHONPATH’, etc.
  78 These environment variables are automatically set when building a package that
  79 uses one of these.
  80
  81 *** Package inputs can be a function of the target system type
  82
  83 The ‘inputs’ field of a package can now be conditional on the value of
  84 (%current-system).  This is useful for packages that take system-dependent
  85 tarballs as inputs, such as GNU/MIT Scheme.
  86
  87 *** New build systems
  88
  89 The ‘perl-build-system’, ‘python-build-system’, and ‘cmake-build-system’ have
  90 been added.  They implement the standard build systems for Perl, Python, and
  91 CMake packages.
  92
  93 *** Tools to build Linux initrds, QEMU images, and more
  94
  95 The (gnu packages linux-initrd) module provides a procedure to build a Linux
  96 initrd (“initial RAM disk”).  The initrd embeds Guile, which is used to
  97 evaluate the given expression.  The example below returns an initrd that
  98 mounts the /proc file system and starts a REPL:
  99
 100   (expression->initrd
 101     '(begin
 102        (mkdir "/proc")
 103        (mount "none" "/proc" "proc")
 104        ((@ (system repl repl) start-repl))))
 105
 106 More examples in the linux-initrd.scm file.
 107
 108 Experimental interfaces to produce and use QEMU images are provided by the
 109 (gnu system vm) module.  For instance, the
 110 ‘expression->derivation-in-linux-vm’ evaluates the given Scheme expression in
 111 a QEMU virtual machine running the Linux kernel and Guile.
 112
 113 ** GNU distribution
 114
 115 Many updates and additions have been made to the distribution.  Here are the
 116 highlights.
 117
 118 *** Major updates
 119
 120 GCC 4.7.3 (the default) and GCC 4.8.0, Binutils 2.23.2, Guile 2.0.9,
 121 Coreutils 8.20, GDB 7.6, Texinfo 5.1.
 122
 123 *** Noteworthy new packages
 124
 125 TeXLive, Xorg, GNU GRUB, GNU Parted, QEMU and QEMU-KVM, Avahi, Bigloo,
 126 CHICKEN, Scheme48, Hugs, Python, Lua, Samba.