GNU Guix Package Manager Looks To Grow

Written by Michael Larabel in GNU on 12 February 2014 at 02:35 PM EST. 15 Comments
GNU
The GNU Guix package manager / distribution system is still active in development and the developers have planned a road-map to reaching version 1.0.

At FOSDEM earlier this month there was a presentation on GNU Guix by one of its lead developers, Ludovic Courtès. Ludovic talked at length about Guix as the GNU's package manager and distribution that focuses upon being dependable, hackable, and liberating. Guix has been a GNU project since late 2012 and its most recent release, Guix 0.5, was released in mid-December.

Those unfamiliar with the Guix package management system / distribution can visit GNU.org. The Guix slides from FOSDEM this month are available in PDF form. Among the Guix presentation highlights were:

- Guix supports per-user and transactional package installation, transactional upgrades, rollback support, and other functionality. Guix is already considered a full-featured package manager and should be deployable on any Linux system. GNU Guix is mostly written in Scheme...

- The self-contained Guix distribution is up to 600+ packages and supports three platforms. The supported architectures right now are i686, x86_64, and mips64el.

- The road-map for GNU Guix 1.0 involves a simple installer ISO image, a real build farm for its package building infrastructure, and making more packages available. The new GNU Guix installer ISO is said to be coming real soon.

- GNU Guix developers are interested in feedback from those trying to deploy the software on their own distribution.
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