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Tentative GNU Guix Road Map

-*- mode: org; coding: utf-8; -*-

Copyright © 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 Ludovic Courtès <[email protected]>

Copying and distribution of this file, with or without modification, are permitted in any medium without royalty provided the copyright notice and this notice are preserved.

The goals of the GNU Guix project are two-fold:

  • to build a purely functional package manager, based on Nix and Guile;
  • to use it to build a practical 100% free software distribution of GNU/Linux and possibly other GNU variants, with a focus on the promotion and tight integration of GNU components–the GNU system.

Since its inception, the project has gone a long way towards that goal. Below is a list of items we want for version “1.0” of the Guix System Distribution. There will be a few 0.x releases by then to give the new features more exposure and testing.

You’re welcome to discuss this road map on [email protected] or #guix on the Libera Chat IRC network!

Features scheduled for 1.0

  • larger & more robust build farm
    • we need a powerful, dedicated front-end
    • armhf-linux build machine
    • leave Hydra in favor of ‘guix publish’ + custom code?
  • more OS features
    • LVM support
    • encrypted root
    • configurable name service switch
    • whole-system unit tests, using VMs
  • more service definitions
    • mcron, postfix(?), wicd(?), etc.
  • better ‘guix system’
    • ‘reconfigure’ should be able to restart non-essential services
    • support for ‘–list-generations’ and ‘–delete-generations’
  • better ‘guix pull’
    • using Git to fetch the source instead of re-downloading everything
    • build more quickly
    • install new .mo files and new manual
    • authentication of the Guix source: use signed commits?
  • simplified, purely declarative service list in ‘operating-system’
    • it should be possible to inspect the service instance declarations and settings
  • GUIs
    • integrate guix-web?
    • guile-ncurses installer?
  • ‘guix publish’?

Features for later

  • complete GNU/Hurd port
  • use content-based addressing when downloading substitutes to reduce bandwidth requirements
    • design nar v2 format where file contents are replaced by their hashes
    • leverage gnu/store.links
  • binary origin tracking
    • keep signatures in sqlite.db
    • preserve signatures upon import/export
  • peer-to-peer distribution of updates (GNUnet?)
  • more deterministic builds
    • identify & fix sources of non-determinism in builds
    • strengthen guix-daemon containers to further increase reproducibility
    • trusting-trust: bootstrap with different tool chains
    • fixed-point: re-bootstrap until fixed point is reached
    • distributed validation: compare contents of store items with others
      • resist a hydra.gnu.org compromise
  • reproducible containers: mix of ‘guix environment’ and ‘guix system vm’
  • execute code with least privilege
    • build containers like guix-daemon does
    • provide a Plash-like interface in Bash
  • daemon rewritten in Guile
  • more shepherd integration
    • monitor network interfaces and start/stop events based on that
    • include a DHCP client written in Scheme