Functional Package Management with Guix Ludovic Courtès Bordeaux, France
[email protected] ABSTRACT 1. INTRODUCTION We describe the design and implementation of GNU Guix, a GNU Guix1 is a purely functional package manager for the purely functional package manager designed to support a com- GNU system [20], and in particular GNU/Linux. Pack- plete GNU/Linux distribution. Guix supports transactional age management consists in all the activities that relate upgrades and roll-backs, unprivileged package management, to building packages from source, honoring the build-time per-user profiles, and garbage collection. It builds upon the and run-time dependencies on packages, installing, removing, low-level build and deployment layer of the Nix package man- and upgrading packages in user environments. In addition ager. Guix uses Scheme as its programming interface. In to these standard features, Guix supports transactional up- particular, we devise an embedded domain-specific language grades and roll-backs, unprivileged package management, (EDSL) to describe and compose packages. We demonstrate per-user profiles, and garbage collection. Guix comes with a how it allows us to benefit from the host general-purpose distribution of user-land free software packages. programming language while not compromising on expres- siveness. Second, we show the use of Scheme to write build Guix seeks to empower users in several ways: by offering the programs, leading to a \two-tier" programming system. uncommon features listed above, by providing the tools that allow users to formally correlate a binary package and the Categories and Subject Descriptors \recipes" and source code that led to it|furthering the spirit D.4.5 [Operating Systems]: Reliability; D.4.5 [Operating of the GNU General Public License|, by allowing them to Systems]: System Programs and Utilities; D.1.1 [Software]: customize the distribution, and by lowering the barrier to Applicative (Functional) Programming entry in distribution development.