GNU Guix 0.5 released

[Ludovic Courtès]

We are pleased to announce release of GNU Guix version 0.5, representing
395 commits by 11 people over 2 months.

This release comes with an updated QEMU virtual machine image that shows
preliminary work toward building a stand-alone GNU system with Guix.
The image uses the GNU Linux-Libre kernel and the GNU dmd init system.
It is console-only, and may be used primarily to try out Guix and dmd.


• About

  GNU Guix is a functional package manager and distribution of
  the GNU system.

  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, with Guile Scheme
  programming interfaces.

  At this stage Guix can be used on top of an i686, x86_64, or mips64el
  GNU/Linux system, or in a virtual machine.  Future versions will
  stand alone.

  http://www.gnu.org/software/guix/


• Download

  Here are the compressed sources and a GPG detached signature[*]:
    ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/guix/guix-0.5.tar.gz
    ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/guix/guix-0.5.tar.gz.sig

    ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/guix/gnu-system-demo-0.5.qcow2.xz
    ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/guix/gnu-system-demo-0.5.qcow2.xz.sig

  Use a mirror for higher download bandwidth:
    http://www.gnu.org/order/ftp.html

  Here are the MD5 and SHA1 checksums:

  34ec4229899df46c5eb3b7c3980ebd75  guix-0.5.tar.gz
  62cfda802011d43ec0427e9269939938f69c9be8  guix-0.5.tar.gz

  745ae52a24b231f74f7efb7caa79705f  gnu-system-demo-0.5.qcow2.xz
  e950a0deb590b0386b937f86b25b211fc4fd8c29  gnu-system-demo-0.5.qcow2.xz

  [*] Use a .sig file to verify that the corresponding file (without the
  .sig suffix) is intact.  First, be sure to download both the .sig file
  and the corresponding tarball.  Then, run a command like this:

    gpg --verify guix-0.5.tar.gz.sig

  If that command fails because you don't have the required public key,
  then run this command to import it:

    gpg --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --recv-keys EA52ECF4

  and rerun the 'gpg --verify' command.

  This release was bootstrapped with the following tools:
    Autoconf 2.69
    Automake 1.14
    Makeinfo 5.2


  To use the virtual machine image, run QEMU like this:

    qemu-system-x86_64 -m 256 -net nic,model=e1000 -net user \
         gnu-system-demo-0.5.qcow2

  This enables networking support, which is useful when using Guix
  inside of it.


• Changes since version 0.4 (excerpt from the NEWS file)

  ** Package management
  *** GNU package descriptions synchronized with the ‘gnumaint’ repository

  In addition to synopses, descriptions of GNU packages are now kept in sync
  with the ‘gnumaint’ repository, which is the canonical place for GNU package
  meta-data.

  ** Programming interfaces
  *** Patches are now listed as part of ‘origin’

  The ‘origin’ form supports two new fields: ‘patches’ (list of patches), and
  ‘snippet’ (code snippet to modify the source.)  These are applied when running
  ‘guix build --source’.  See “Defining Packages” in the manual.

  *** New (guix monads) monadic interface to operate on the store

  See “The Store Monad” in the manual.  The (gnu system …) modules have been
  rewritten to use this monadic interface.

  *** New (guix profiles) module

  It provides an API for dealing with profiles, as with the ‘guix package’
  command.

  *** New (gnu system) module

  This module provides a generic way to describe the system’s configuration,
  and to instantiate it, regardless of the final medium (QEMU image, etc.)
  See “System Configuration” in the manual.

  This is work in progress.  Send feedback to address@hidden

  *** ‘build-expression->derivation’ uses more parameters

  Some positional parameters have been changed to keyword parameters.
  See “Derivations” in the manual.

  ** GNU distribution
  *** New port to the Loongson MIPS64 processors, n32 ABI (‘mips64el-linux’)

  Bootstrap binaries have been built for that architecture, and several
  Loongson-specific patches not yet available upstream have been applied to core
  packages.  See “GNU Distribution” and “Porting” in the manual.

  Pre-built binaries are not yet available via hydra.gnu.org, so Guix will
  build from source on this platform.

  *** 110 new packages

  acct, alive, alsa-utils, apl, at-spi2-atk, at-spi2-core, atkmm, autogen,
  automoc4, brasero, bridge-utils, cairomm, catkin, complexity, evince, ffmpeg,
  fftw, ftgl, gcc-objc, gcc-objc++, gccgo, gcl, gfortran, glibmm, glpk,
  gnome-icon-theme, gnu-pw-mgr, gp2c, gpgme, gsettings-desktop-schemas, gtkmm,
  gtksourceview, guile-ssh, guile-wm, gvpe, hicolor-icon-theme, httpd, icecat,
  icon-naming-utils, json-c, lapack, libcanberra, libcap, libgnome-keyring,
  libmikmod, libnl, libnotify, libsamplerate, libsigc++, libsndfile, libssh,
  libtheora, libxkbcommon, mercurial, mtools, netcat, pangomm, parallel,
  pavucontrol, pciutils, pem, perl-encode-locale, perl-file-list,
  perl-file-listing, perl-html-parser, perl-html-tagset, perl-http-cookies,
  perl-http-daemon, perl-http-date, perl-http-message, perl-http-negotiate,
  perl-io-html, perl-libwww, perl-libxml, perl-lwp-mediatypes, perl-net-http,
  perl-uri, perl-www-robotrules, perl-xml-dom, perl-xml-regexp, perl-xml-simple,
  phonon, powertop, pulseaudio, python2-dogtail, python2-empy, qemu-headless,
  qt, qt, raptor2, scons, sdl, sdl-gfx, sdl-image, sdl-mixer, sdl-net, sdl-ttf,
  sdl2, serveez, shared-mime-info, sharutils, skribilo, slim, soprano, swig,
  xcb-util, xcb-util-image, xcb-util-keysyms, xcb-util-renderutil, xcb-util-wm

  *** 47 package updates

  atk 2.10.0, bison 3.0.2, cmake 2.8.12, dmd 0.1, freeipmi 1.3.3, gcc 4.8.2,
  gcc 4.8.2, gcc-cross-mips64el-linux-gnuabi64 4.8.2, gcc-stripped-tarball 
4.8.2,
  gdb 7.6.2, gettext 0.18.3.1, glib 2.38.0, global 6.2.9, gmp 5.1.3,
  gnupg 2.0.22, gobject-introspection 1.38.0, grep 2.15, gsl 1.16,
  gtk+ 2.24.21, gtk+ 3.10.1, guile 2.0.9, guile 2.0.9, guile-xcb 1.2,
  harfbuzz 0.9.22, hello 2.9, iproute2 3.12.0, libdrm 2.4.46,
  libextractor 1.2, libjpeg 9, libmicrohttpd 0.9.32, lightning 2.0.2,
  linux-libre 3.12, lzip 1.15, make 4.0, mit-krb5 1.11.3, pari-gp 2.5.5,
  pixman 0.32.4, python 3.3.2, qemu 1.6.1,
  qemu-with-multiple-smb-shares 1.6.1, rcs 5.9.2, recutils 1.6, rsync 3.1.0,
  tar 1.27.1, texinfo 5.2, units 2.02, xorriso 1.3.2

  *** Packages are now built with GCC 4.8.2 by default (was 4.7.3)

  ** Native language support
  *** New ‘sr’ (Serbian) translation
  *** New ‘vi’ (Vietnamese) translation
  *** Updated ‘pt_BR’ (Brazilian Portuguese) translation
  ** Bugs fixed
  *** ‘guix pull’ compiles Guix deterministically and correctly

  Previously, the build environment was not cleared in between ‘compile-file’
  calls, leading to build errors due to Guile bug http://bugs.gnu.org/15602 .

  *** ‘guix package’ allows removal of a specific package output
      (http://bugs.gnu.org/15756)
  *** ‘guix-daemon’ always sets umask to 022
      (http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-guix/2013-07/msg00033.html)
  *** Files referenced by environment variables are protected from GC
  *** Yet unbuilt packages get correctly installed (http://bugs.gnu.org/15283)
  *** ‘bootstrap-graph.{png,eps,pdf}’ built in srcdir 
(http://bugs.gnu.org/15640)


Please report bugs to address@hidden
Join address@hidden and #guix on Freenode for discussions.

Thanks to everyone who’s helped over the last two months!
See the ‘AUTHORS’ and ‘THANKS’ files for the list of people.

Ludovic, on behalf of the Guix team.

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