What's Guix
Table of Contents
1 Definition
Guix is both the name to an operating system distribution and a package manager. As it is developed by the GNU Project, it follows the principles of Free Software and thus all packages provided are free software. One interesting thing is that it is mainly written in Guile Scheme, a functional language from the LISP family, which, personally, has proven to be really nice to code with.
If you use another GNU/Linux distribution, Guix may be used as a package manager, so that you can have access to all packages available for the Guix operating system. I, for instance, have Guix on top of Ubuntu.
1.1 Installation
I installed Guix using the shell installer script that can be found at this link.
1.2 Using Guix
As mentioned before, I use Guix as a package manager, meaning that it manages installing, upgrading, removing packages and so on. Below is a quick demonstration of a simple usage of Guix:
Suppose you want to install a flash cards app, you can search for it with:
$ guix search flash cards
This way, information like version, license, webpage and a description of packages matching what you're looking for will be shown on your screen.
Then, after seeing what your options are, you decide to install Anki. This can be simply done too:
$ guix install anki
Notice how there's no need to have privileged access - which means, no root privileges are necessary - to install a package. Now, after installing it, you might wonder how this package is definied in the Guix source code and you might even want to edit it:
$ guix edit anki
For some reason, you want to remove a package. Then go ahead and:
$ guix remove anki
And, finally, to quickly have a list all of the packages installed:
$ guix package -I
2 My internship goal
Hopefully, after understanding the basics of Guix, you might wonder how my internship fits into all this. My goal is to implement a subcommand similar to 'git log', but specific to Guix.
Packages have different versions, and, for many reasons, sometimes
it's better to have one instead of another. Guix makes having older
versions of packages possible through the time-machine command. A
user can, for instance, provide a commit hash id as an option to
this command ('guix time-machine --commit=<commit-id> -- build
<package>'), and then build a package as it was defined back
then. The commit hash id is necessary as the package definitions are
in a Git repository.
With 'guix git log', Guix commit history will be avaiable pretty easily and it will be possible to retrieve information related to, for instance, when a package was last upgraded. Some of the work done so far is described in my second blog post.