Hello Guix!
We released 1.1.0, but what’s coming next? What would you like to see?
There are many exciting things being developed and great ideas floating
around. For myself, I feel like focusing on “consolidating” what we
have in the coming weeks. Here are the areas I hope to focus on (and
embarking as many of you as possible :-)):
1. Authentication. I want to finally provide a standardized mechanism
to allow channels to be authenticated upon ‘guix pull’. “make
authenticate” was a first milestone, let’s get it done. See
<https://issues.guix.gnu.org/issue/22883>.
2. Performance. There are many things we can improve there, first and
foremost: the “Computing derivation” part of ‘guix pull’, Guile’s
compiler terrible time and space requirements, further optimizing
core operations like ‘package-derivation’, as well as low-level
stuff as described at <https://issues.guix.gnu.org/issue/40626>.
Related to that is the question of substitute availability, another
major hindrance to usability. We should address this both in the
build farm (reducing the
time-to-push-to-time-of-substitute-availability, tracking random
build failures), and on the client side (can we provide ways for
users to pull to a commit that won’t require them to build
everything from source, while not compromising on their security?).
3. G-exps. We should really finish the migration to gexps, as in the
‘wip-build-system-gexp’ branch, and adjust our APIs accordingly.
4. User interface. Let’s get our act together with ‘guix shell’ and
‘guix run-script’, and let’s address other annoyances that
newcomers keep stumbling upon!
Thoughts?
Happy hacking! :-)
Ludo’.
