Ludovic Courtès

GNU, Guix, Guile, reproducible research, etc.

Email: ludo@gnu.org
OpenPGP: 3CE4 6455 8A84 FDC6 9DB4 0CFB 090B 1199 3D9A EBB5
Lingvoj: fr en eo es ca
Web: https://people.bordeaux.inria.fr/lcourtes/

Last Notes

2025-05-10 14:05:59 UTC

The great #Guix migration has started.
https://codeberg.org/guix

2025-03-28 15:39:57 UTC

📢 #Guix comrades: two weeks left to discuss and improve the Codeberg migration proposal! 👇
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix/guix-consensus-documents.git/tree/002-codeberg.md
Discussion 👉 https://issues.guix.gnu.org/76503

2025-03-15 21:46:56 UTC

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C is terrible and Rust is so much better, but I don’t think memory safety is the only justification for having ‘ls’ in Rust.
Some of those active in this effort worked on replacing GCC with Clang in distros before.

2025-03-15 21:44:11 UTC

Bye, copyleft. Hello, corporate interests.
https://fosstodon.org/@gnutools/114168573791483805

2024-11-23 18:39:07 UTC

Hey, I realized it’s been 12 years of #Guix today! 🎉

2024-10-16 21:19:41 UTC

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I don’t know, but it’s an issue worth revisiting collectively at some point.

2024-09-10 21:48:27 UTC

This 1990 UN General Assembly resolution entitled “Right of peoples to self-determination/Struggle by all available means” is worth a read:
https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-184801/
“Reaffirms the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for independence […]”
“Strongly condemns the constant and deliberate violations of the fundamental rights of the Palestinian people, as well as the expansionist activities of Israel […]”

2024-08-28 14:47:04 UTC

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“Interesting” thing is that Guile-Git’s test suite allowed me to find a uninitialized-value bug introduced in libgit2 1.8.1 (a patch release).

2024-08-28 14:44:20 UTC

#Guile-Git 0.8.0 is out, with support for libgit2 1.8.
https://gitlab.com/guile-git/guile-git

2024-08-22 12:12:17 UTC

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Another example: “Docker is simpler than Guix (or Nix, etc.) because it lets me use Bash, apt, pip, and other proven tools!”
That is a valid first impression, but the problem with Docker is elsewhere: it lets you blindly assemble software in a way that is opaque and non-reproducible.
Appreciating that this is a problem takes time and experience, whereas one can immediately have an opinion on what Dockerfiles look like.

2024-08-22 12:07:52 UTC

Got another of these syntax discussions: “#Guix packaging would look much easier if it used YAML like Conda!”.
This perception exists, but packaging experience shows that the difficulty, instead, lies in coping with funky build systems, providing the right dependencies, etc.
The same extends to many things in computing systems: discussions focus on the surface of things, ignoring that actual complexity stems from unprincipled assembly of whole stacks of software components.