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 ** Bugs fixed
  40 *** “guix --help” now works when using Guile 2.0.5
  41 *** Binary substituter multi-threading and pipe issues fixed
  42
  43 These could lead to random substituter crashes while substituting a binary.
  44 See commits 0332386 and 101d9f3 for details.
  45
  46 *** Binary substituter gracefully handles lack of network connectivity
  47
  48 * Changes in 0.2 (since 0.1)
  49
  50 ** Package management
  51
  52 *** Guix commands are now sub-commands of the “guix” program
  53
  54 Instead of typing “guix-package”, one now has to type “guix package”, and so
  55 on.  This has allowed us to homogenize the user interface and initial program
  56 setup, and to allow commands to be upgradable through “guix pull”.
  57
  58 *** New “guix package --upgrade” option
  59
  60 As the name implies, this option atomically upgrades all the packages
  61 installed in a profile or the set of packages matching a given regexp.
  62 See “Invoking guix package” in the manual.
  63
  64 *** New “guix package --search” option
  65
  66 Performs a full text search in package synopses and descriptions, and returns
  67 the matching packages in recutils format.  See “Invoking guix package” in the
  68 manual, for details.
  69
  70 *** New “guix pull” command
  71
  72 The command pulls the latest version of Guix–both the package management
  73 modules and the distribution.  See the manual for details.
  74
  75 *** New binary substituter
  76
  77 The “substituter” mechanism allows pre-built binaries to be transparently
  78 downloaded instead of performing a build locally.  Currently binaries are
  79 available for x86_64 Linux-based GNU systems from http://hydra.gnu.org.  The
  80 distribution is continuously built and binaries are made available from there.
  81
  82 See http://hydra.gnu.org/jobset/gnu/master under “Job status” for the list of
  83 available binary packages.
  84
  85 *** New “guix refresh” command
  86
  87 The command is used by Guix maintainers.  It automatically updates the
  88 distribution to the latest upstream releases of GNU software.
  89
  90 *** New “guix hash” command
  91
  92 Convenience command to compute the hash of a file.  See the manual for
  93 details.
  94
  95 *** Nix daemon code updated
  96
  97 The daemon code from Nix, used by the ‘guix-daemon’ command, has been updated
  98 to current Nix ‘master’.
  99
 100 ** Programming interfaces
 101
 102 *** (guix download) now supports HTTPS, using GnuTLS
 103
 104 It allows package source tarballs to be retrieved over HTTPS.
 105
 106 *** New ‘native-search-path’ and ‘search-path’ package fields
 107
 108 Packages can define in their ‘native-search-path’ field environment variables
 109 that define search paths and need to be set for proper functioning of the
 110 package.  For instance, GCC has ‘CPATH’ and ‘LIBRARY_PATH’ in its
 111 ‘native-search-path’, Perl has ‘PERL5LIB’, Python has ‘PYTHONPATH’, etc.
 112 These environment variables are automatically set when building a package that
 113 uses one of these.
 114
 115 *** Package inputs can be a function of the target system type
 116
 117 The ‘inputs’ field of a package can now be conditional on the value of
 118 (%current-system).  This is useful for packages that take system-dependent
 119 tarballs as inputs, such as GNU/MIT Scheme.
 120
 121 *** New build systems
 122
 123 The ‘perl-build-system’, ‘python-build-system’, and ‘cmake-build-system’ have
 124 been added.  They implement the standard build systems for Perl, Python, and
 125 CMake packages.
 126
 127 *** Tools to build Linux initrds, QEMU images, and more
 128
 129 The (gnu packages linux-initrd) module provides a procedure to build a Linux
 130 initrd (“initial RAM disk”).  The initrd embeds Guile, which is used to
 131 evaluate the given expression.  The example below returns an initrd that
 132 mounts the /proc file system and starts a REPL:
 133
 134   (expression->initrd
 135     '(begin
 136        (mkdir "/proc")
 137        (mount "none" "/proc" "proc")
 138        ((@ (system repl repl) start-repl))))
 139
 140 More examples in the linux-initrd.scm file.
 141
 142 Experimental interfaces to produce and use QEMU images are provided by the
 143 (gnu system vm) module.  For instance, the
 144 ‘expression->derivation-in-linux-vm’ evaluates the given Scheme expression in
 145 a QEMU virtual machine running the Linux kernel and Guile.
 146
 147 ** GNU distribution
 148
 149 Many updates and additions have been made to the distribution.  Here are the
 150 highlights.
 151
 152 *** Major updates
 153
 154 GCC 4.7.3 (the default) and GCC 4.8.0, Binutils 2.23.2, Guile 2.0.9,
 155 Coreutils 8.20, GDB 7.6, Texinfo 5.1.
 156
 157 *** Noteworthy new packages
 158
 159 TeXLive, Xorg, GNU GRUB, GNU Parted, QEMU and QEMU-KVM, Avahi, Bigloo,
 160 CHICKEN, Scheme48, Hugs, Python, Lua, Samba.