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 *** Major updates
  63
  64 FIXME
  65
  66 *** Noteworthy new packages
  67
  68 FIXME
  69
  70 *** Binary packages now available for i686-linux
  71
  72 The build farm at http://hydra.gnu.org now provides 32-bit GNU/Linux binaries
  73 (i686-linux), in addition to the x86_64-linux binaries.  Both can be
  74 transparently used as substitutes for local builds on these platforms.
  75
  76 *** Debug info packages
  77
  78 Some packages now have a “debug” output containing debugging information.  The
  79 “debug” output can be used by GDB, and can be installed separately from the
  80 other outputs of the package.  See “Installing Debugging Files” in the manual.
  81
  82 *** Bootstrap binaries can be cross-compiled
  83
  84 The distribution can now be ported to new architectures (currently
  85 GNU/Linux-only) by cross-compiling the “bootstrap binaries”.  See “Porting”
  86 in the manual.
  87
  88 *** Bootstrapping documented
  89
  90 See “Bootstrapping” in the manual, for information on how the GNU
  91 distribution builds “from scratch”.
  92
  93 ** Internationalization
  94
  95 New translations: eo, pt_BR.
  96
  97 ** Bugs fixed
  98 *** “guix --help” now works when using Guile 2.0.5
  99 *** Binary substituter multi-threading and pipe issues fixed
 100
 101 These could lead to random substituter crashes while substituting a binary.
 102 See commits 0332386 and 101d9f3 for details.
 103
 104 *** Binary substituter gracefully handles lack of network connectivity
 105
 106 *** Daemon properly handles rebuilds of multiple-output derivations
 107
 108 Previously it would fail when rebuilding a multiple-output derivation when
 109 some (but not all) of its outputs were already present.  See
 110 http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-guix/2013-06/msg00038.html and
 111 https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/122 .
 112
 113
 114 *** ‘guix package -i foo:out’ no longer removes other outputs of ‘foo’
 115
 116 Previously only the ‘out’ output of package ‘foo’ would be kept in the
 117 profile.
 118
 119 * Changes in 0.2 (since 0.1)
 120
 121 ** Package management
 122
 123 *** Guix commands are now sub-commands of the “guix” program
 124
 125 Instead of typing “guix-package”, one now has to type “guix package”, and so
 126 on.  This has allowed us to homogenize the user interface and initial program
 127 setup, and to allow commands to be upgradable through “guix pull”.
 128
 129 *** New “guix package --upgrade” option
 130
 131 As the name implies, this option atomically upgrades all the packages
 132 installed in a profile or the set of packages matching a given regexp.
 133 See “Invoking guix package” in the manual.
 134
 135 *** New “guix package --search” option
 136
 137 Performs a full text search in package synopses and descriptions, and returns
 138 the matching packages in recutils format.  See “Invoking guix package” in the
 139 manual, for details.
 140
 141 *** New “guix pull” command
 142
 143 The command pulls the latest version of Guix–both the package management
 144 modules and the distribution.  See the manual for details.
 145
 146 *** New binary substituter
 147
 148 The “substituter” mechanism allows pre-built binaries to be transparently
 149 downloaded instead of performing a build locally.  Currently binaries are
 150 available for x86_64 Linux-based GNU systems from http://hydra.gnu.org.  The
 151 distribution is continuously built and binaries are made available from there.
 152
 153 See http://hydra.gnu.org/jobset/gnu/master under “Job status” for the list of
 154 available binary packages.
 155
 156 *** New “guix refresh” command
 157
 158 The command is used by Guix maintainers.  It automatically updates the
 159 distribution to the latest upstream releases of GNU software.
 160
 161 *** New “guix hash” command
 162
 163 Convenience command to compute the hash of a file.  See the manual for
 164 details.
 165
 166 *** Nix daemon code updated
 167
 168 The daemon code from Nix, used by the ‘guix-daemon’ command, has been updated
 169 to current Nix ‘master’.
 170
 171 ** Programming interfaces
 172
 173 *** (guix download) now supports HTTPS, using GnuTLS
 174
 175 It allows package source tarballs to be retrieved over HTTPS.
 176
 177 *** New ‘native-search-path’ and ‘search-path’ package fields
 178
 179 Packages can define in their ‘native-search-path’ field environment variables
 180 that define search paths and need to be set for proper functioning of the
 181 package.  For instance, GCC has ‘CPATH’ and ‘LIBRARY_PATH’ in its
 182 ‘native-search-path’, Perl has ‘PERL5LIB’, Python has ‘PYTHONPATH’, etc.
 183 These environment variables are automatically set when building a package that
 184 uses one of these.
 185
 186 *** Package inputs can be a function of the target system type
 187
 188 The ‘inputs’ field of a package can now be conditional on the value of
 189 (%current-system).  This is useful for packages that take system-dependent
 190 tarballs as inputs, such as GNU/MIT Scheme.
 191
 192 *** New build systems
 193
 194 The ‘perl-build-system’, ‘python-build-system’, and ‘cmake-build-system’ have
 195 been added.  They implement the standard build systems for Perl, Python, and
 196 CMake packages.
 197
 198 *** Tools to build Linux initrds, QEMU images, and more
 199
 200 The (gnu packages linux-initrd) module provides a procedure to build a Linux
 201 initrd (“initial RAM disk”).  The initrd embeds Guile, which is used to
 202 evaluate the given expression.  The example below returns an initrd that
 203 mounts the /proc file system and starts a REPL:
 204
 205   (expression->initrd
 206     '(begin
 207        (mkdir "/proc")
 208        (mount "none" "/proc" "proc")
 209        ((@ (system repl repl) start-repl))))
 210
 211 More examples in the linux-initrd.scm file.
 212
 213 Experimental interfaces to produce and use QEMU images are provided by the
 214 (gnu system vm) module.  For instance, the
 215 ‘expression->derivation-in-linux-vm’ evaluates the given Scheme expression in
 216 a QEMU virtual machine running the Linux kernel and Guile.
 217
 218 ** GNU distribution
 219
 220 Many updates and additions have been made to the distribution.  Here are the
 221 highlights.
 222
 223 *** Major updates
 224
 225 GCC 4.7.3 (the default) and GCC 4.8.0, Binutils 2.23.2, Guile 2.0.9,
 226 Coreutils 8.20, GDB 7.6, Texinfo 5.1.
 227
 228 *** Noteworthy new packages
 229
 230 TeXLive, Xorg, GNU GRUB, GNU Parted, QEMU and QEMU-KVM, Avahi, Bigloo,
 231 CHICKEN, Scheme48, Hugs, Python, Lua, Samba.