Café Guix - The guix time-machine and guix describe commands
May 27, 2024
Visio
28 May 2024 from 1pm to 2pm
This session will be hosted by Marek Felšöci, post-doctoral researcher at INRIA and ICUBE on this link.
In Guix, software packages, including Guix itself, are made available through what are known as channels. Over time, the package offering in these channels evolves. Versions change, new Guix packages or features appear, others disappear. For example, in 2021 it was possible to ask Guix to create a software environment with the Inkscape package in version 0.92 using the command =guix environment –pure –ad-hoc inkscape@0.92=. In 2024, the channel in question no longer offered version 0.92 of Inkscape and the =guix environment= command was replaced by the new =guix shell= command.
In order to reuse the command line and recover the original software environment, we need to go back in time. Impossible? Not for Guix! At the next Café Guix, we’ll be looking at how to use his time machine, the =guix time-machine= command. The channels, which are in fact versioned git repositories, make it possible to keep track of changes. If you have the list of channels and their respective commit numbers at the time, using =guix time-machine=, you can go back to exactly the right moment in 2021. Although it is possible to approximate the correct time marker a posteriori, it is preferable to keep track of it from the beginning. In this context, we’ll also learn about the =guix describe= command.
As a reminder, Café Guix is a place and time for informal, French-speaking exchange around the Guix software environment manager. Students, researchers, system administrators, IT support staff from labs or computer centers - everyone is welcome to join us for this one-hour monthly meeting, where we can discuss questions raised by everyone about Guix and its use in the broadest sense. You will find all the information concerning the “Cafés Guix” here: https://hpc.guix.info/events/2024/café-guix/.