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 0.3 (since 0.2)
  15
  16 ** Package management
  17
  18 *** Cross-compilation support
  19
  20 Guix can now cross-build packages.  On the command-line, this is achieved with
  21 the new ‘--target’ command-line option of ‘guix build’.  At the Scheme level,
  22 the guts of this is the ‘package-cross-derivation’ procedure.  Core packages
  23 of the distribution can already be cross-compiled.  See the manual for
  24 details.
  25
  26 *** New ‘--max-silent-time’ option for “guix build” and “guix package”
  27
  28 See the manual for details.
  29
  30 *** New ‘--fallback’ option for “guix build” and “guix package”
  31
  32 This option instructs to fall back to local builds when the substituter fails
  33 to download a substitute.
  34
  35 *** New ‘--requisites’ option for “guix gc”
  36
  37 See the manual for details.
  38
  39 *** New ‘--key-download’ option for “guix refresh”
  40
  41 See the manual for details.
  42
  43 ** Programming interfaces
  44
  45 *** New ‘package-cross-derivation’ procedure in (guix derivations)
  46
  47 See the manual for details.
  48
  49 *** New ‘%current-target-system’ SRFI-39 parameter
  50
  51 This parameter is like ‘%current-system’, but for cross-compilation.  It
  52 allows code in package definitions (such as in the ‘arguments’ field) to know
  53 whether it is being cross-compiled, and what the target system is.
  54
  55 *** New (guix hash) module; new ‘open-sha256-port’ and ‘sha256-port’ procedures
  56
  57 This improves performance of SHA256 computations.
  58
  59
  60 ** GNU distribution
  61
  62 *** 33 new packages
  63
  64 alsa-lib, babel, cairo, cvs, gcal, gcc-cross-mips64el-linux-gnuabi64, gd,
  65 gdk-pixbuf, graphviz, grue-hunter, gtk+, gts, harfbuzz, imagemagick, iproute2,
  66 iptables, libspectre, mpg321, noweb, pango, plotutils, privoxy, pytz, racket,
  67 rubber, rush, strace, tk, torsocks, unrtf, vc-dwim, wordnet, xlockmore
  68
  69 *** 25 package updates
  70
  71 automake 1.14, ed 1.9, freeipmi 1.2.8, gawk 4.1.0, gcc 4.8.1, gettext 0.18.3,
  72 glib 2.37.1, gmp 5.1.2, gnutls 3.2.1, gzip 1.6, help2man 1.43.3, libapr 1.4.8,
  73 libaprutil 1.5.2, libassuan 2.1.1, libffi 3.0.13, libgc 7.2d, libgpg-error
  74 1.12, libidn 1.28, libpng 1.5.17, lout 3.40, lsh 2.1, nettle 2.7.1, qemu
  75 1.5.1, tzdata 2013d, xorriso 1.3.0
  76
  77 *** Binary packages now available for i686-linux
  78
  79 The build farm at http://hydra.gnu.org now provides 32-bit GNU/Linux binaries
  80 (i686-linux), in addition to the x86_64-linux binaries.  Both can be
  81 transparently used as substitutes for local builds on these platforms.
  82
  83 *** Debug info packages
  84
  85 Some packages now have a “debug” output containing debugging information.  The
  86 “debug” output can be used by GDB, and can be installed separately from the
  87 other outputs of the package.  See “Installing Debugging Files” in the manual.
  88
  89 *** Bootstrap binaries can be cross-compiled
  90
  91 The distribution can now be ported to new architectures (currently
  92 GNU/Linux-only) by cross-compiling the “bootstrap binaries”.  See “Porting”
  93 in the manual.
  94
  95 *** Bootstrapping documented
  96
  97 See “Bootstrapping” in the manual, for information on how the GNU
  98 distribution builds “from scratch”.
  99
 100 ** Internationalization
 101
 102 New translations: eo, pt_BR.
 103
 104 ** Bugs fixed
 105 *** “guix --help” now works when using Guile 2.0.5
 106 *** Binary substituter multi-threading and pipe issues fixed
 107
 108 These could lead to random substituter crashes while substituting a binary.
 109 See commits 0332386 and 101d9f3 for details.
 110
 111 *** Binary substituter gracefully handles lack of network connectivity
 112
 113 *** Daemon properly handles rebuilds of multiple-output derivations
 114
 115 Previously it would fail when rebuilding a multiple-output derivation when
 116 some (but not all) of its outputs were already present.  See
 117 http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-guix/2013-06/msg00038.html and
 118 https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/122 .
 119
 120 *** ‘guix package -i foo:out’ no longer removes other outputs of ‘foo’
 121
 122 Previously only the ‘out’ output of package ‘foo’ would be kept in the
 123 profile.
 124
 125 *** Replacement (srfi srfi-37) provided if the user’s one is broken
 126
 127 When the user’s (srfi srfi-37) is affected by http://bugs.gnu.org/13176 (Guile
 128 < 2.0.9), a replacement with the bug fix is provided.  This bug would affect
 129 command-line argument processing in some cases.
 130
 131 * Changes in 0.2 (since 0.1)
 132
 133 ** Package management
 134
 135 *** Guix commands are now sub-commands of the “guix” program
 136
 137 Instead of typing “guix-package”, one now has to type “guix package”, and so
 138 on.  This has allowed us to homogenize the user interface and initial program
 139 setup, and to allow commands to be upgradable through “guix pull”.
 140
 141 *** New “guix package --upgrade” option
 142
 143 As the name implies, this option atomically upgrades all the packages
 144 installed in a profile or the set of packages matching a given regexp.
 145 See “Invoking guix package” in the manual.
 146
 147 *** New “guix package --search” option
 148
 149 Performs a full text search in package synopses and descriptions, and returns
 150 the matching packages in recutils format.  See “Invoking guix package” in the
 151 manual, for details.
 152
 153 *** New “guix pull” command
 154
 155 The command pulls the latest version of Guix–both the package management
 156 modules and the distribution.  See the manual for details.
 157
 158 *** New binary substituter
 159
 160 The “substituter” mechanism allows pre-built binaries to be transparently
 161 downloaded instead of performing a build locally.  Currently binaries are
 162 available for x86_64 Linux-based GNU systems from http://hydra.gnu.org.  The
 163 distribution is continuously built and binaries are made available from there.
 164
 165 See http://hydra.gnu.org/jobset/gnu/master under “Job status” for the list of
 166 available binary packages.
 167
 168 *** New “guix refresh” command
 169
 170 The command is used by Guix maintainers.  It automatically updates the
 171 distribution to the latest upstream releases of GNU software.
 172
 173 *** New “guix hash” command
 174
 175 Convenience command to compute the hash of a file.  See the manual for
 176 details.
 177
 178 *** Nix daemon code updated
 179
 180 The daemon code from Nix, used by the ‘guix-daemon’ command, has been updated
 181 to current Nix ‘master’.
 182
 183 ** Programming interfaces
 184
 185 *** (guix download) now supports HTTPS, using GnuTLS
 186
 187 It allows package source tarballs to be retrieved over HTTPS.
 188
 189 *** New ‘native-search-path’ and ‘search-path’ package fields
 190
 191 Packages can define in their ‘native-search-path’ field environment variables
 192 that define search paths and need to be set for proper functioning of the
 193 package.  For instance, GCC has ‘CPATH’ and ‘LIBRARY_PATH’ in its
 194 ‘native-search-path’, Perl has ‘PERL5LIB’, Python has ‘PYTHONPATH’, etc.
 195 These environment variables are automatically set when building a package that
 196 uses one of these.
 197
 198 *** Package inputs can be a function of the target system type
 199
 200 The ‘inputs’ field of a package can now be conditional on the value of
 201 (%current-system).  This is useful for packages that take system-dependent
 202 tarballs as inputs, such as GNU/MIT Scheme.
 203
 204 *** New build systems
 205
 206 The ‘perl-build-system’, ‘python-build-system’, and ‘cmake-build-system’ have
 207 been added.  They implement the standard build systems for Perl, Python, and
 208 CMake packages.
 209
 210 *** Tools to build Linux initrds, QEMU images, and more
 211
 212 The (gnu packages linux-initrd) module provides a procedure to build a Linux
 213 initrd (“initial RAM disk”).  The initrd embeds Guile, which is used to
 214 evaluate the given expression.  The example below returns an initrd that
 215 mounts the /proc file system and starts a REPL:
 216
 217   (expression->initrd
 218     '(begin
 219        (mkdir "/proc")
 220        (mount "none" "/proc" "proc")
 221        ((@ (system repl repl) start-repl))))
 222
 223 More examples in the linux-initrd.scm file.
 224
 225 Experimental interfaces to produce and use QEMU images are provided by the
 226 (gnu system vm) module.  For instance, the
 227 ‘expression->derivation-in-linux-vm’ evaluates the given Scheme expression in
 228 a QEMU virtual machine running the Linux kernel and Guile.
 229
 230 ** GNU distribution
 231
 232 Many updates and additions have been made to the distribution.  Here are the
 233 highlights.
 234
 235 *** Major updates
 236
 237 GCC 4.7.3 (the default) and GCC 4.8.0, Binutils 2.23.2, Guile 2.0.9,
 238 Coreutils 8.20, GDB 7.6, Texinfo 5.1.
 239
 240 *** Noteworthy new packages
 241
 242 TeXLive, Xorg, GNU GRUB, GNU Parted, QEMU and QEMU-KVM, Avahi, Bigloo,
 243 CHICKEN, Scheme48, Hugs, Python, Lua, Samba.