Back from Capitole du Libre (Toulouse)



French speaker, Capitole du Libre is an event in Toulouse dedicated to Free and open-source software (FOSS). I had the opportunity to talk about Guix. The PDF slides (French) are available – the Git repository provides the source.

The talk raised to good questions! Especially one about the difference between Guix and Nix. Well, many things could be told. For the good, the bad or the ugly, I focused my answer on debootstraping (building a compiler or else without using its self-bootstrapped binaries) pointing Camlboot for the OCaml language or this chain for the Rust language. In my opinion, the Guix project tries hard to reduce the set of opaque binaries (seed) required to build an complete GNU/Linux distribution. It is about trusting trust attack (Reflections on Trusting Trust¹ by Ken Thompson).

The other part of my answer was about the continuum of Guix. It is the same language from declaring the package to install (manifest) or declaring the operating system to run, to the core² of Guix, through the package definitions. All is domain-specific language (DSL) based on the Scheme programming language (see Guile).

Last, it was a great week-end! A good occasion to share meals with old friends. And to meet Guix contributors (Julien, Brice and Ivan if I do not mispell).

Join the fun, join Guix!