Detailed program > Friday 10th November

Curious about Guix but haven’t yet had a chance to give it a try? Coming from apt, Spack, CONDA, pip? Wondering whether it meets your specific needs?

This tutorial aims to get you started with Guix. We will start with the main commands to manage software with Guix, including on-demand environments with guix shell. We will discuss the technicalities and gotchas one needs to be aware of—from environment variables to pre-built binaries to containerization. We will introduce channels, how they let you extend the package collection of Guix, and how they let you pin your complete software environment so you can reproduce it elsewhere and at different points in time.

This tutorial is dedicated to review what can be done when that’s not enough to list dependencies and/or declare a build system . The aim is to introduce various mechanisms for adapting the base Guix recipe. The prerequisite is the reading of the section “Defining Packages” from the manual and the goal of this tutorial is to provide some ingredients for making it sound. We propose to first introduce a Scheme/Guile Swiss-knife toolbox, then to cover how to modify upstream source code (field origin) and how to customize the build system parameters or phases (field arguments). If time allows, we will introduce the meaning of cryptic symbols as the sequence #~(#$(%.

Do not forget that packaging is a craft, so there is no magic but only practise.