Re: GNU Guix 1.2.0rc2 available for testing!

[zimoun <zimon.toutoune@gmail.com>]

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Hi Ludo,

On Wed, 18 Nov 2020 at 19:53, Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> wrote:

> If everything goes well, let’s release on Monday 23rd.

Birthday release? :-)


> You can also check the ‘NEWS’ file and the draft blog post at
> <https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix/guix-artwork.git/tree/website/drafts/gnu-guix-1.2.0-released.md>
> to make sure your favorite feature is mentioned and/or to discuss the
> highlights in the blog post.

Attached the first rough draft blog post for GuixHPC blog; I forgot my
password to push to the INRIA forge… and too late to wait the reset. :-)


All the best,
simon
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From 2823439d49d83e35ae30df51dcd38d6fb86cd5b7 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Simon Tournier <simon.tournier@u-paris.fr>
Date: Thu, 19 Nov 2020 03:10:55 +0100
Subject: [PATCH] Add draft notes for 1.2.0.

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+title: DRAFT HPC & reproducible research in Guix 1.2.0
+date: 2020-11-19 02:00:00
+author: Simon Tournier
+slug: hpc-reproducible-research-in-guix-1.2.0
+tags: packages, releases
+---
+
+Version 1.2.0 of Guix was [announced
+yesterday](https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2020/gnu-guix-1.2.0-released/).  As
+the announcement points out, some 200 people contributed more than
+10,000 commits since the previous release.  This post focuses on
+important changes for HPC users, admins, and scientists made since
+version 1.1.0 was released in April 2020.
+
+# Reproducible science workflows
+
+We’re giving users more flexibility on the command line, with the
+addition of three [*package transformation
+options*](https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Package-Transformation-Options.html):
+`--with-debug-info` ([always debug in good
+conditions](https://guix.gnu.org/manual/devel/en/html_node/Rebuilding-Debug-Info.html)!),
+`--with-c-toolchain`, and `--without-tests`.  Consider this example:
+
+```
+guix build octave-cli \
+  --with-c-toolchain=fftw=gcc-toolchain@10 \
+  --with-c-toolchain=fftwf=gcc-toolchain@10
+```
+
+The command above builds a variant of the fftw and fftwf packages using
+version 10 of gcc-toolchain instead of the default tool chain, and then builds
+a variant of the GNU Octave command-line interface using them. GNU Octave
+itself is also built with gcc-toolchain@10.
+
+This other example builds the Hardware Locality (hwloc) library and its
+dependents up to intel-mpi-benchmarks with the Clang C compiler:
+
+```
+guix build --with-c-toolchain=hwloc=clang-toolchain \
+           intel-mpi-benchmarks
+```
+
+On the side of long-term archival of all the software Guix packages refer to,
+Guix now serves the file [`sources.json`](http://guix.gnu.org/sources.json)
+that is ingested by [Software Heritage](https://softwareheritage.org) via the
+[nixguix
+loader](https://docs.softwareheritage.org/devel/_modules/swh/loader/package/nixguix.html).
+In addition to the “archival” check of `guix lint` which sends a “save”
+request to Software Heritage for the specified packages.  More packages are
+continuously archived.
+
+The new option `--path` of [`guix
+graph`](https://guix.gnu.org/manual/devel/en/html_node/Invoking-guix-graph.html),
+shows the shortest path between two nodes.  The example below shows the
+shortest path between the packages gmsh and cunit:
+
+```
+guix graph --path gmsh cunit
+gmsh@4.6.0
+metis@5.1.0
+openblas@0.3.9
+cunit@2.1-3
+
+```
+
+Moreover, the command [`guix
+repl`](https://guix.gnu.org/manual/devel/en/html_node/Invoking-guix-repl.html)
+can now be passed a script which ease [package exploratinon in
+Guile](https://hpc.guix.info/blog/2020/01/reproducible-computations-with-guix/)
+especially when dealing with the new Scheme `(guix transformation)` module for
+package transformations.  And the section [“Programming
+Interface”](https://guix.gnu.org/manual/devel/en/html_node/Programming-Interface.html)
+of the *reference manual* has been greatly expounded.
+
+The [`guix
+pack`](https://guix.gnu.org/manual/devel/en/html_node/Invoking-guix-pack.html#Invoking-guix-pack)
+command creates “application bundles” that can be used to deploy software on
+machines that do not run Guix (yet!), such as HPC clusters. Since its
+[inception in
+2017](https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2017/creating-bundles-with-guix-pack/), it has
+seen a number of improvements.  The relocatable packs can be now [faster by
+the addition of the Fakechroot
+engine](https://hpc.guix.info/blog/2020/05/faster-relocatable-packs-with-fakechroot/).
+
+
+# Packages
+
+Here are highlights among the 2,179 packages added and 4,487 packages
+upgraded since the previous release:
+
+ - [Gmsh](https://hpc.guix.info/package/gmsh) has been upgraded to 4.6.0.
+ - [MPICH](https://hpc.guix.info/package/mpich) is now at 3.3.2.
+ - [Open MPI](https://hpc.guix.info/package/openmpi) is now at 4.0.5.
+ - [GCC](https://hpc.guix.info/package/gcc-toolchain) 10.2.0 is
+    available and [LLVM, Clang](https://hpc.guix.info/package/clang-toolchain)
+    11.0.0 too.
+ - [Julia](https://hpc.guix.info/package/julia) has been upgraded to
+    1.5.2.
+ - [MPI4PY](https://hpc.guix.info/package/python-mpi4py) is at
+    3.0.3.
+ - For statisticians, there’s now a total of 1,488 R packages, many of
+    which comes from [Bioconductor](https://www.bioconductor.org/) 3.11.
+    
+Last but not least, *the manual is fully translated* to
+[French](https://guix.gnu.org/manual/fr/html_node/),
+[German](https://guix.gnu.org/manual/de/html_node/), and
+[Spanish](https://guix.gnu.org/manual/es/html_node/), with partial
+translations in [Russian](https://guix.gnu.org/manual/ru/html_node/) and
+[Chinese](https://guix.gnu.org/manual/zh-cn/html_node/).
+
+Do not miss the [release
+notes](https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2020/gnu-guix-1.2.0-released/) for more.
+
+### Try it!
+
+We want Guix to be accessible and useful to a broad audience and that
+has again been a guiding principle for this release.  The [graphical
+system
+installer](https://guix.gnu.org/en/videos/system-graphical-installer/)
+and the [script to install Guix on another
+distro](https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Binary-Installation.html)
+have both received bug fixes and usability improvements.  First-time
+users will appreciate the fact that `guix help` now gives a clear
+overview of the available commands, that `guix` commands are less
+verbose by default, and that `guix pull` displays a progress bar as it
+updates its Git checkout.
+
+We’ve been told [you may soon be able to `apt install
+guix`](https://packages.debian.org/guix) if you’re on Debian or a derivative
+distro!—[get in touch with us](https://guix.gnu.org/en/contact/).
+
+Enjoy the new release!

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