Controlling Software Environments with GNU Guix

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1 Controlling Software Environments with GNU Guix Ludovic Courtès Inria Bordeaux Sud-Ouest November 2016

2 The difficulty of keeping software environments under control.

3 #1. Upgrades are hard.

6 #2. Stateful system management is intractable.

7 $DISTRO $DISTRO

8 $DISTRO apt-get update $DISTRO apt-get update state 1 a state 1 b

9 $DISTRO apt-get update $DISTRO apt-get update state 1 a apt-get install foo state 1 b apt-get remove bar state 2 a state 2 b

10 $DISTRO apt-get update $DISTRO apt-get update state 1 a apt-get install foo state 1 b apt-get remove bar state 2 a apt-get remove bar state 2 b apt-get install foo state 3 a state 3 b

11 $DISTRO apt-get update $DISTRO apt-get update state 1 a state 2 a apt-get install foo =? apt-get remove bar state 1 b apt-get remove bar state 2 b apt-get install foo state 3 a state 3 b

12 #3. Entropy keeps increasing.

17 Giving up?

18 Giving up? app bundles (Docker images & co.)

19 Debian and other distributions are going to be that thing you run docker on, little more. Jos Poortvliet, owncloud developer

20 It s also that thing you run inside Docker!

23 May

27 app bundles are headed wrong difficulty to compose software packages wrong abstraction level: image vs. package hardly reproducible: we have the bits, not the source makes it hard to customize & experiment

29 Make packaging great again!

31 Guix 1. transactional package manager 2. software environment manager 3. APIs & tools to customize environments 4. packaging tools

32 $ guix package -i gcc-toolchain coreutils sed grep... $ eval guix package --search-paths... $ guix package --manifest=my-software.scm...

33 Want to get started hacking on hwloc?

34 Want to get started hacking on hwloc? A simple matter of installing the deps, right?

35 hwloc pkg-config-0.29 libx cairo ncurses-6.0 expat numactl libpciaccess inputproto xextproto xtrans kbproto libxcb-1.11 zlib python-wrapper ghostscript libspectre poppler fontconfig freetype glib libpng libxext libxrender pixman python-minimal-wrapper xcb-proto-1.11 libxslt libpthread-stubs-0.3 libxau libxdmcp openssl-1.0.2h python-minimal libgcrypt libxml xproto perl libgpg-error-1.22 util-macros bzip gdbm-1.12 libffi sqlite readline-6.3 tcl tk python lcms-2.6 libjpeg-8d libpaper libtiff libjpeg-9a gobject-introspection openjpeg cairo gs-fonts-8.11 gettext dbus bash coreutils-8.25 tzdata-2015g pcre-8.38 renderproto libxft bison flex python acl gmp libcap-2.24 m bison indent attr

36 $ guix environment --container hwloc... $ guix environment --container hwloc \ --ad-hoc git autoconf automake gdb...

37 $ guix build hello isolated build: chroot, separate name spaces, etc.

38 $ guix build hello /gnu/store/ h2g4sf hwloc hash of all the dependencies

39 $ guix build hello /gnu/store/ h2g4sf hwloc $ guix gc --references /gnu/store/...-hwloc /gnu/store/...-glibc-2.24 /gnu/store/...-gcc lib /gnu/store/...-hwloc

40 $ guix build hello /gnu/store/ h2g4sf hwloc $ guix gc --references /gnu/store/...-hwloc /gnu/store/...-glibc-2.24 /gnu/store/...-gcc lib /gnu/store/...-hwloc (nearly) bit-identical for everyone

41 Can we go beyond mere reproducibility and support experimentation?

43 Creating package variants at the command line

44 $ guix build hwloc \ --with-source=./hwloc-42.0rc1.tar.gz...

45 $ guix build hwloc \ --with-source=./hwloc-42.0rc1.tar.gz... $ guix package -i mumps \ --with-input=scotch=pt-scotch...

46 Your personal packages or variants in GUIX PACKAGE PATH!

47 GuixSD: declarative OS config

48 Status.

49 started in ,400+ packages, all free software 4 architectures: x86 64, i686, ARMv7, mips64el binaries at released in August 2016

50 cluster deployments & usage Max Delbrück Center (DE): 250-node cluster + workstations Utrecht Bioinformatics Center (NL): 68-node cluster (1,000+ cores) GeneNetwork, framework for web-based genetics

53 Wrap-up.

54 Summary Guix supports reproducible software environments... can be extended with personal packages... allows for experimentation through customization... is entirely programmable

56 Copyright c 2010, Ludovic Courtès ludo@gnu.org. GNU GuixSD logo, CC-BY-SA 4.0, Copyright of other images included in this document is held by their respective owners. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. To view a copy of this license, visit or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. At your option, you may instead copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is available at The source of this document is available from

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