News from the Planet

Part 2 of regular expressions in Guile Scheme: quantifiers, interval expressions and greedy matching

Part 1 of an introduction to regular expressions in Guile Scheme: metacharacters and character sets

Many applications are packaged in OCI images but not in Guix. A good subset of them is written either in NodeJS, Go, Rust or languages that, as a general approach, encourage applications to have huge dependency graphs.

After thinking about multi-stage Debian rebuilds I wanted to implement the idea. Recall my illustration:

Remember the XZ Utils backdoor? One factor that enabled the attack was poor auditing of the release tarballs for differences compared to the Git version controlled source code. This proved to be a useful place to distribute malicious data.

Can Guix's G-expressions make for a superior Make-like build tool? Here's a proof-of-concept implementation imagining such a future.

“Does it really need to run as root?” When talking to system administrators of large supercomputers about installing Guix and having its build daemon run as root, this question would quickly come up—and rightfully so. We’re happy to announce that <uix-daemon can now run without root privileges by…

I rebuilt (the top-50 popcon) Debian and Ubuntu packages, on amd64 and arm64, and compared the results a couple of months ago. Since then the Reproduce.Debian.net effort has been launched. Unlike my small experiment, that effort is a full-scale rebuild with more architectures. Their goal is to…

Around a year ago I discussed two concerns with software release archives (tarball artifacts) that could be improved to increase confidence in the supply-chain security of software releases. Repeating the goals for simplicity:

Hello! Today I want to talk about ANSI escape codes. For a long time I was vaguely aware of ANSI escape codes (“that’s how you make text red in the terminal and stuff”) but I had no real understanding of where they were supposed to be defined or whether or not there were standards for them. I…

In this post we'll see how to install and configure Prosody, an open-source XMPP server. We will be deploying Prosody on a Hetzner cloud instance, provisioned and configured with Guix and the powerful guix deploy command.

I was talking to a friend about how to add a directory to your PATH today. It’s something that feels “obvious” to me since I’ve been using the terminal for a long time, but when I searched for instructions for how to do it, I actually couldn’t find something that explained all of the steps – a lot…

Guix-HPC is a collaborative effort to bring reproducible software deployment to scientific workflows and high-performance computing (HPC). Guix-HPC builds upon the GNU Guix software deployment tools and aims to make them useful for HPC practitioners and scientists concerned with dependency graph…

A few weeks ago I ran a terminal survey (you can read the results here) and at the end I asked: What’s the most frustrating thing about using the terminal for you? 1600 people answered, and I decided to spend a few days categorizing all the responses. Along the way I learned that classifying…

A bit out of order, but things tangle, a problem I’m having on my Guix machine with Emacs.

Today I had to setup a Nextcloud instance on a cloud server. A completely scripted approach (e.g. via Ansible or OpenTofu) felt a bit over-engineered in my particular case, so I went for a semi-manual installation.

Hello! Recently I ran a terminal survey and I asked people what frustrated them. One person commented: There are so many pieces to having a modern terminal experience. I wish it all came out of the box. My immediate reaction was “oh, getting a modern terminal experience isn’t that hard, you just…

I've been noodling on the possibility of managing a bunch of Guix machines with Goblins for a little while now. Spent a little time at a local coffee shop today thinking about how this might work...

I am using GitLab CI/CD pipelines for several upstream projects (libidn, libidn2, gsasl, inetutils, libtasn1, libntlm, …) and a long-time concern for these have been that there is too little testing on GNU Guix. Several attempts have been made, and earlier this year Ludo’ came really close to…

It is possible to contribute to improving #guix as the need for new functionalities, packages, fixes or upgrades arise. This is one of the strongest points in open communities: the possibility to participate on the development and continuous improvement of the tool. Let’s see how it goes when it…

This is a painful post to write. It's about a choice one should never have to make, the choice between software freedom and security.

Remote #ci is the way to go in #modernhw digital design testing. In this #ciseries, let’s see how to implement it with detail using sourcehut and a real world example. Sourcehut is a lightweight #gitforge where I host my #git repositories. Not only it is based on a paradigm perfectly adapted to…

Remote #ci is the way to go in #modernhw digital design testing. In this #ciseries, let’s see how to implement it with detail using sourcehut and a real world example. Sourcehut is a lightweight #gitforge where I host my #git repositories. Not only it is based on a paradigm perfectly adapted to…

Recently I’ve been thinking about how everything that happens in the terminal is some combination of: Your operating system’s job Your shell’s job Your terminal emulator’s job The job of whatever program you happen to be running (like top or vim or cat) The first three (your operating system,…

Remote #ci is the way to go in #modernhw digital design testing. In this #ciseries, let’s see it in practice with some detail using two of the most popular forges out there.