Beyond Bundles - Reproducible Software Environments with GNU Guix

<!--HTML--><p>Building reproducible data analysis pipelines and numerical experiments is a key challenge for reproducible science, in which tools to reproduce software environments play a critical role.</p> <p>The advent of “container-based” deployment tools such as Docker and Singularity has made it easier to replicate software environments. These tools are very much about bundling the bits of software binaries in a convenient way, not so much about describing how software is composed. Science is not just about replicating, though—it demands the ability to inspect and to experiment.</p> <p>In this talk we will present GNU Guix, a software management toolkit. Guix departs from container-based solutions in that it enables declarative composition of software environments. It is comparable to “package managers” like apt or yum, but with a significant difference: Guix provides accurate provenance tracking of build artifacts, and bit-reproducible software. We will illustrate the many ways in which Guix can improve how software environments are managed: as a transactional package manager, as a VirtualEnv-style environment manager, or as a container provisioning tool. We will show that the tools lend themselves well to customization of the environment and report on our experience in a scientific and HPC context.</p> <p><strong>About the speakers</strong></p> <p>Ricardo Wurmus is a free software hacker and GNU/Linux system administrator. He’s currently working to support the high performance computing platform at the Max-Delbrück-Centrum where he develops and packages scientific software using the functional package manager GNU Guix. As a core contributor and co-maintainer of GNU Guix he has extensive experience in making stubborn software work.</p> <p>Ludovic Courtès is a free software developer and functional programming enthusiast. He is currently working as a research engineer at Inria, with a focus on improving GNU Guix for the high-performance computing (HPC) and reproducible science use cases. Ludovic is a co-maintainer of GNU Guix, and a co-maintainer of the GNU Guile implementation of Scheme.</p>