Guix & reproducible builds at LibrePlanet 2018

Ludovic Courtès — April 5, 2018

LibrePlanet, the yearly free software conference organized by the Free Software Foundation, took place a week ago. Among the many great talks and workshops, David Thompson, a core Guix developer also working as a DevOps, presented many aspects of Guix and GuixSD in his talk, Practical, verifiable software freedom with GuixSD (video, slides).

In a similar domain, Chris Lamb, current Debian Project Leader and a driving force behind the Reproducible Builds effort, gave a talk entitled You think you're not a target? A tale of three developers... (video, slides).

About GNU Guix

GNU Guix is a transactional package manager for the GNU system. The Guix System Distribution or GuixSD is an advanced distribution of the GNU system that relies on GNU Guix and respects the user's freedom.

In addition to standard package management features, Guix supports transactional upgrades and roll-backs, unprivileged package management, per-user profiles, and garbage collection. Guix uses low-level mechanisms from the Nix package manager, except that packages are defined as native Guile modules, using extensions to the Scheme language. GuixSD offers a declarative approach to operating system configuration management, and is highly customizable and hackable.

GuixSD can be used on an i686, x86_64 and armv7 machines. It is also possible to use Guix on top of an already installed GNU/Linux system, including on mips64el and aarch64.