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
  40 ** Programming interfaces
  41
  42 *** New (guix hash) module; new ‘open-sha256-port’ and ‘sha256-port’ procedures
  43
  44 This improves performance of SHA256 computations.
  45
  46 ** Bugs fixed
  47 *** “guix --help” now works when using Guile 2.0.5
  48 *** Binary substituter multi-threading and pipe issues fixed
  49
  50 These could lead to random substituter crashes while substituting a binary.
  51 See commits 0332386 and 101d9f3 for details.
  52
  53 *** Binary substituter gracefully handles lack of network connectivity
  54
  55 *** Daemon properly handles rebuilds of multiple-output derivations
  56
  57 Previously it would fail when rebuilding a multiple-output derivation when
  58 some (but not all) of its outputs were already present.  See
  59 http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-guix/2013-06/msg00038.html and
  60 https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/122 .
  61
  62 * Changes in 0.2 (since 0.1)
  63
  64 ** Package management
  65
  66 *** Guix commands are now sub-commands of the “guix” program
  67
  68 Instead of typing “guix-package”, one now has to type “guix package”, and so
  69 on.  This has allowed us to homogenize the user interface and initial program
  70 setup, and to allow commands to be upgradable through “guix pull”.
  71
  72 *** New “guix package --upgrade” option
  73
  74 As the name implies, this option atomically upgrades all the packages
  75 installed in a profile or the set of packages matching a given regexp.
  76 See “Invoking guix package” in the manual.
  77
  78 *** New “guix package --search” option
  79
  80 Performs a full text search in package synopses and descriptions, and returns
  81 the matching packages in recutils format.  See “Invoking guix package” in the
  82 manual, for details.
  83
  84 *** New “guix pull” command
  85
  86 The command pulls the latest version of Guix–both the package management
  87 modules and the distribution.  See the manual for details.
  88
  89 *** New binary substituter
  90
  91 The “substituter” mechanism allows pre-built binaries to be transparently
  92 downloaded instead of performing a build locally.  Currently binaries are
  93 available for x86_64 Linux-based GNU systems from http://hydra.gnu.org.  The
  94 distribution is continuously built and binaries are made available from there.
  95
  96 See http://hydra.gnu.org/jobset/gnu/master under “Job status” for the list of
  97 available binary packages.
  98
  99 *** New “guix refresh” command
 100
 101 The command is used by Guix maintainers.  It automatically updates the
 102 distribution to the latest upstream releases of GNU software.
 103
 104 *** New “guix hash” command
 105
 106 Convenience command to compute the hash of a file.  See the manual for
 107 details.
 108
 109 *** Nix daemon code updated
 110
 111 The daemon code from Nix, used by the ‘guix-daemon’ command, has been updated
 112 to current Nix ‘master’.
 113
 114 ** Programming interfaces
 115
 116 *** (guix download) now supports HTTPS, using GnuTLS
 117
 118 It allows package source tarballs to be retrieved over HTTPS.
 119
 120 *** New ‘native-search-path’ and ‘search-path’ package fields
 121
 122 Packages can define in their ‘native-search-path’ field environment variables
 123 that define search paths and need to be set for proper functioning of the
 124 package.  For instance, GCC has ‘CPATH’ and ‘LIBRARY_PATH’ in its
 125 ‘native-search-path’, Perl has ‘PERL5LIB’, Python has ‘PYTHONPATH’, etc.
 126 These environment variables are automatically set when building a package that
 127 uses one of these.
 128
 129 *** Package inputs can be a function of the target system type
 130
 131 The ‘inputs’ field of a package can now be conditional on the value of
 132 (%current-system).  This is useful for packages that take system-dependent
 133 tarballs as inputs, such as GNU/MIT Scheme.
 134
 135 *** New build systems
 136
 137 The ‘perl-build-system’, ‘python-build-system’, and ‘cmake-build-system’ have
 138 been added.  They implement the standard build systems for Perl, Python, and
 139 CMake packages.
 140
 141 *** Tools to build Linux initrds, QEMU images, and more
 142
 143 The (gnu packages linux-initrd) module provides a procedure to build a Linux
 144 initrd (“initial RAM disk”).  The initrd embeds Guile, which is used to
 145 evaluate the given expression.  The example below returns an initrd that
 146 mounts the /proc file system and starts a REPL:
 147
 148   (expression->initrd
 149     '(begin
 150        (mkdir "/proc")
 151        (mount "none" "/proc" "proc")
 152        ((@ (system repl repl) start-repl))))
 153
 154 More examples in the linux-initrd.scm file.
 155
 156 Experimental interfaces to produce and use QEMU images are provided by the
 157 (gnu system vm) module.  For instance, the
 158 ‘expression->derivation-in-linux-vm’ evaluates the given Scheme expression in
 159 a QEMU virtual machine running the Linux kernel and Guile.
 160
 161 ** GNU distribution
 162
 163 Many updates and additions have been made to the distribution.  Here are the
 164 highlights.
 165
 166 *** Major updates
 167
 168 GCC 4.7.3 (the default) and GCC 4.8.0, Binutils 2.23.2, Guile 2.0.9,
 169 Coreutils 8.20, GDB 7.6, Texinfo 5.1.
 170
 171 *** Noteworthy new packages
 172
 173 TeXLive, Xorg, GNU GRUB, GNU Parted, QEMU and QEMU-KVM, Avahi, Bigloo,
 174 CHICKEN, Scheme48, Hugs, Python, Lua, Samba.