We are excited to announce the first release of Guix-Science channel: v20260907.

What's the Guix-Science channel?

It's a dedicated Guix channel from the Guix-Science project. The channel provides a comprehensive, community-driven, scientific software catalog suitable for the global scientific community.

With the increased usage of Guix in scientific contexts, there is also a growing need for packaging software used in the research and teaching spheres. Although the Guix project encourages users to contribute packages to the main Guix channel, some packages cannot be included there because they do not comply with Guix's packaging policy, or because they are too specialized to be used outside an HPC context. The Guix-Science channel has a more permissive policy than the main Guix channel; especially regarding the usage of pre-built components. Additionally, it has a more lenient deprecation policy than Guix proper.

The Guix-Science channel is maintained for and by scientific practitioners. We consider the channel a central hub for science packages covering a wide range of fields. This allows the community to share the packaging and maintenance efforts. We encourage you to take part on the channel development. Moreover, once a package is included in Guix-Science, binary substitutes are built on our own infrastructure, and are publicly available for everyone.

What constitutes a Guix-Science release?

Guix follows a rolling-release model. This means that users receive updates as the packages land on the master branch. Consequently, the Guix-Science channel follows the same approach. Thanks to the guix time-machine command, users do not need to worry that updates on their channels will break their environments. This mechanism allows users to pin their channels, giving them control on when to update their environments.

In the day-to-day use, scientific practitioners hit a common annoyance: Guix and Guix-Science channels need to be compatible. Although both Guix and Guix-Science folks do their best to avoid breakages, it might happen that one unrelated change in Guix, has an impact on some Guix-Science packages; potentially breaking them.

A Guix-Science release is a snapshot of both Guix-Science and Guix where all the packages provided by Guix-Science are installable. A release is a tagged commit of the Guix-Science channel where a channels file is provided. This channels file declares the dependency that Guix-Science has on the Guix proper channel. If you look at the tagged commit message, you will find the following section:

;; Guix-Science release v20260907
;;
;; Guix revision: 0fb918d61609f3aadc2d8ecc212926b3bdfabb4c
(list (channel
       (name 'guix-science)
       (url "https://codeberg.org/guix-science/guix-science.git")
       (branch "master")
       (commit "8b23b5c024aaff671ab4008ad8d253480788a1cc")
       (introduction
        (make-channel-introduction
         "b1fe5aaff3ab48e798a4cce02f0212bc91f423dc"
         (openpgp-fingerprint
          "CA4F 8CF4 37D7 478F DA05  5FD4 4213 7701 1A37 8446"))))
      (channel
       (name 'guix)
       (url "https://git.guix.gnu.org/guix.git")
       (branch "master")
       (commit "0fb918d61609f3aadc2d8ecc212926b3bdfabb4c")
       (introduction
        (make-channel-introduction
         "9edb3f66fd807b096b48283debdcddccfea34bad"
         (openpgp-fingerprint
          "BBB0 2DDF 2CEA F6A8 0D1D  E643 A2A0 6DF2 A33A 54FA")))))

The tag name follows this pattern: vYYYYMMDD.

You can show and verify the contents of the tag from a Guix-Science checkout with:

git tag --verify v20260907

Downloading Guix-Science `v20260907`

To retrieve the release you have two options:

Go to the Guix-Science - Releases # v20260907 of the Codeberg Guix-Science channel repository and download the file channels-v20260907.scm.

Use guix time-machine:

guix time-machine -C https://codeberg.org/guix-science/guix-science/releases/download/v20260907/channels-v20260907.scm -- COMMAND …

If this is the first time you use Guix-Science, this will result in an error:

error: channel 'guix-science' is not trusted

To overcome this, mark Guix-Science as “trusted” by adding the following snippet to ~/.config/guix/trusted-channels.scm:

(append (channel
                (name 'guix-science)
                (url "https://codeberg.org/guix-science/guix-science.git")
                (introduction
                 (make-channel-introduction
                  "b1fe5aaff3ab48e798a4cce02f0212bc91f423dc"
                  (openpgp-fingerprint "CA4F 8CF4 37D7 478F DA05  5FD4 4213 7701 1A37 8446"))))
              %default-channels)

Release Guix-Science v20260907

This release contains 2,354 packages from a wide spectrum of scientific fields.

The highlights of this release are:

Migration of packages hosted in the Guix-HPC channel to the Guix-Science channel.
Consolidation of StarPU, Chameleon, PaStiX, Composyx, qr_mumps, Netlib HPL, Gyselalib++ and PDI packages.
Addition of the core components of a full stack digital health framework for neuroimaging applications, FSLeyes. All these packages are now available to scientific practitioners.

Moving forward we are planning on making periodic releases. Keep an eye on Guix-Science - Releases. We encourage everyone to take part on the channel.