[Bio-packaging] testing out guix

[Ricardo Wurmus]

pjotr.public66 at thebird.nl writes:

> On Wed, Jun 10, 2015 at 09:45:23AM +1000, Ben Woodcroft wrote:
>> Good. But the question of versions is I think more fundamental than
>> the fact sometime software X requires an old version of software Y.
>> Perhaps I care about this more than I should, but sometimes I prefer
>> to use old versions for the sake of scientific control - if I used
>> version 1 on sample A last year and now I want to analyse sample B
>> but only the newer version 2 is installed, then I'm stuck. Sometimes
>> older software is better, even if it is buggier and provides no
>> extra features.

(I seem to be missing the original message containing this quote, so
please excuse my double quoting.)

Ludovic and I wrote a paper about reproducible HPC environments with
Guix, which addresses these concerns and contains even a couple of
Scheme snippets that show how the dependency graph can be manipulated
to, say, replace all instances of an input with another all the way down
the dependency graph.

The final draft still under review for Reppar 2015.  Notification is in
20 days or so, at which point I'll be posting a link here.

~~ Ricardo