The DMBCS Guix Channel

GNU Guix is a powerful transactional, functional package manager configured through a declarative language (Scheme). It is so powerful that it can be used to build an entire (and very comprehensive) operating system: GNU GuixSD.

The Guix home page is at https://www.gnu.org/software/guix, and a very comprehensive manual is at https://guix.gnu.org/manual.

Channels are extensions to the base Guix system. The DMBCS channel allows us to disseminate projects that we are working on ahead of official releases. Note that, for this reason, the channel should be considered transient in nature, and the software in a pre-release state of evolution.

The channel descriptor is (note that this was redefined 2024-02-26; you may need to expunge an old version from your .cache/guix/checkouts directory, and delete the file /var/guix/profiles/per-user/[name]/current-guix-[version]-link), before a fresh guix pull).

(channel
  (name 'dmbcs-development)
  (url "https://rdmp.org/dmbcs/guix-channel.git")
  (branch "trunk")
  (introduction
     (make-channel-introduction
         "2ea5ab7cc2408b316edfea947c5c522d57031758"
         (openpgp-fingerprint
            "E23C 21ED 864F F4F3 A711  4CDF CA47 1FD5 0161 8A49"))))

This must be returned as part of a list of channel descriptors in your ${HOME}/.config/guix/channels.scm file; the obvious way to do this is to enclose it in a (list ...) form. See here for the official documentation of Guix channels.

Once you have the above, after performing a guix pull, you can perform guix package --install ... with the following packages.

• mcron@1.2.0+dmbcs
• guile@3.0.4+dmbcs
• dmbcs-micro-server
• curlpp: A C++ wrapper around the popular libcurl; see https://github.com/jpbarrette/curlpp for details
• hack-font: Our go-to font for software development; the—slightly horrible—home page is at https://sourcefoundry.org/hack