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 *** New ‘--max-silent-time’ option for “guix build” and “guix package”
  18
  19 See the manual for details.
  20
  21 ** Bugs fixed
  22 *** “guix --help” now works when using Guile 2.0.5
  23 *** Binary substituter multi-threading and pipe issues fixed
  24
  25 These could lead to random substituter crashes while substituting a binary.
  26 See commits 0332386 and 101d9f3 for details.
  27
  28 * Changes in 0.2 (since 0.1)
  29
  30 ** Package management
  31
  32 *** Guix commands are now sub-commands of the “guix” program
  33
  34 Instead of typing “guix-package”, one now has to type “guix package”, and so
  35 on.  This has allowed us to homogenize the user interface and initial program
  36 setup, and to allow commands to be upgradable through “guix pull”.
  37
  38 *** New “guix package --upgrade” option
  39
  40 As the name implies, this option atomically upgrades all the packages
  41 installed in a profile or the set of packages matching a given regexp.
  42 See “Invoking guix package” in the manual.
  43
  44 *** New “guix package --search” option
  45
  46 Performs a full text search in package synopses and descriptions, and returns
  47 the matching packages in recutils format.  See “Invoking guix package” in the
  48 manual, for details.
  49
  50 *** New “guix pull” command
  51
  52 The command pulls the latest version of Guix–both the package management
  53 modules and the distribution.  See the manual for details.
  54
  55 *** New binary substituter
  56
  57 The “substituter” mechanism allows pre-built binaries to be transparently
  58 downloaded instead of performing a build locally.  Currently binaries are
  59 available for x86_64 Linux-based GNU systems from http://hydra.gnu.org.  The
  60 distribution is continuously built and binaries are made available from there.
  61
  62 See http://hydra.gnu.org/jobset/gnu/master under “Job status” for the list of
  63 available binary packages.
  64
  65 *** New “guix refresh” command
  66
  67 The command is used by Guix maintainers.  It automatically updates the
  68 distribution to the latest upstream releases of GNU software.
  69
  70 *** New “guix hash” command
  71
  72 Convenience command to compute the hash of a file.  See the manual for
  73 details.
  74
  75 *** Nix daemon code updated
  76
  77 The daemon code from Nix, used by the ‘guix-daemon’ command, has been updated
  78 to current Nix ‘master’.
  79
  80 ** Programming interfaces
  81
  82 *** (guix download) now supports HTTPS, using GnuTLS
  83
  84 It allows package source tarballs to be retrieved over HTTPS.
  85
  86 *** New ‘native-search-path’ and ‘search-path’ package fields
  87
  88 Packages can define in their ‘native-search-path’ field environment variables
  89 that define search paths and need to be set for proper functioning of the
  90 package.  For instance, GCC has ‘CPATH’ and ‘LIBRARY_PATH’ in its
  91 ‘native-search-path’, Perl has ‘PERL5LIB’, Python has ‘PYTHONPATH’, etc.
  92 These environment variables are automatically set when building a package that
  93 uses one of these.
  94
  95 *** Package inputs can be a function of the target system type
  96
  97 The ‘inputs’ field of a package can now be conditional on the value of
  98 (%current-system).  This is useful for packages that take system-dependent
  99 tarballs as inputs, such as GNU/MIT Scheme.
 100
 101 *** New build systems
 102
 103 The ‘perl-build-system’, ‘python-build-system’, and ‘cmake-build-system’ have
 104 been added.  They implement the standard build systems for Perl, Python, and
 105 CMake packages.
 106
 107 *** Tools to build Linux initrds, QEMU images, and more
 108
 109 The (gnu packages linux-initrd) module provides a procedure to build a Linux
 110 initrd (“initial RAM disk”).  The initrd embeds Guile, which is used to
 111 evaluate the given expression.  The example below returns an initrd that
 112 mounts the /proc file system and starts a REPL:
 113
 114   (expression->initrd
 115     '(begin
 116        (mkdir "/proc")
 117        (mount "none" "/proc" "proc")
 118        ((@ (system repl repl) start-repl))))
 119
 120 More examples in the linux-initrd.scm file.
 121
 122 Experimental interfaces to produce and use QEMU images are provided by the
 123 (gnu system vm) module.  For instance, the
 124 ‘expression->derivation-in-linux-vm’ evaluates the given Scheme expression in
 125 a QEMU virtual machine running the Linux kernel and Guile.
 126
 127 ** GNU distribution
 128
 129 Many updates and additions have been made to the distribution.  Here are the
 130 highlights.
 131
 132 *** Major updates
 133
 134 GCC 4.7.3 (the default) and GCC 4.8.0, Binutils 2.23.2, Guile 2.0.9,
 135 Coreutils 8.20, GDB 7.6, Texinfo 5.1.
 136
 137 *** Noteworthy new packages
 138
 139 TeXLive, Xorg, GNU GRUB, GNU Parted, QEMU and QEMU-KVM, Avahi, Bigloo,
 140 CHICKEN, Scheme48, Hugs, Python, Lua, Samba.