Re: Reproducible Research Hackathon: Friday, July 3rd

[Konrad Hinsen <konrad.hinsen@fastmail.net>]

Hi Simon et al.,

> We are interested to hear your feedback.  Especially about what pass,
> what fail and what you have learnt, if you enjoyed the experience, or on
> the contrary if you not, what could be improved for the next round.

For me this was the occasion to finally start playing with a channel
(guix-past), which has been on my agenda for a while. It was much easier
with people around to answer practical questions that would take a long
time to resolve by going through the documentation.

It was also a good occasion for thinking about how to package artifacts
of historical interest (i.e. recording release dates as metadata).

In terms of packaging techniques, there wasn't much new in it for me.
Python 2.4 is handled very much like Python 2.7, and since I installed
all this stuff by hand many times back in 2008, it felt almost familiar.

There is an interesting issue left for me to explore, which is why
Python 2.4 compiled with today's gcc has a bug that it definitely didn't
have back then. It's probably related to the many intentional
ambiguities in the C language standard, check out John Regehr's blog
(https://blog.regehr.org/) for interesting examples. That could become a
selling point for Guix because we have the option of compiling old
software with old compilers, which is hard with other infrastructures.

Cheers,
  Konrad