Guix: From transparent and verifiable to long-term reproducible research?
Speaker: Simon Tournier
Track: Academic
Type: Academic paper
Room: Petit amphi
Time: Jul 15 (Tue): 14:30
Duration: 0:20
What’s Guix? A build system? A package manager? An operating system? A Guile/Scheme library? And why academics already in love with Debian might be interested by Guix?
Software plays a central role in scientific production since most of research results are the outcome of computational processes. Hence, the ability to verify research results and to experiment with methodologies, two core tenets of the scientific methods, require reproducible software deployment.
GNU Guix is a software deployment tool that supports reproducible software deployment. Guix features include user specific package installation, transactional upgrades and rollbacks, packing containers, virtual machine instantiation. And Debian and Guix can coexist concurrently on the same running system.
Here, we focus on two features of Guix. When scientific practitioners experiment with methodologies, they need the ability to replace one or more dependencies in the whole set of the dependencies; changing the version, configuration or compilation options, compiler, etc. Guix easily allows to create user customized packages and computational environment variants.
When scientific practitioners verify research results, they need all the source code and how this source code is transformed into binary. This transformation is captured by the Guix revision (snapshot) and easily available via the command `guix time-machine’. What if the source code becomes unreachable? Software Heritage comes in. Software Heritage is a long term, non-profit, multistakeholder initiative with the ambitious goal to collect, preserve and share all source code publicly available, and to our knowledge Software Heritage the largest publicly available archive of source code.
Could we connect Guix with Software Heritage? Yes! It makes Guix the first free software distribution and tool backed by Software Heritage, to our knowledge.
This presentation opens to some remaining challenges toward a better open and reproducible research; especially how package managers can help.