In eat-your-own-dog-food spirit, I converted my ‘~/.ssh/config’ to its Scheme-y counterpart, which allowed for factorizations and is incidentally more pleasant to my eye.

“Vetting the cargo”
https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/897435/397298883e41ef8d/

“There are many ways to improve confidence in the security of a chunk of code. Writing that code in a memory-safe language is one such way […] But more than that is required and, in the end, there is no substitute for simply looking at the code and understanding what it does. […]

The cargo vet mechanism, built into Rust's Cargo dependency manager and build system, is meant to help with the task.”

#SupplyChainSecurity #Rust

🧵

It’s too hot and I can’t get my macro-generating macro to work.

The other day, @vagrantc reported that MaraDNS would pick a Genuine Random Number™ at build time and store it in the resulting binary for eventual reuse:
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2022-06/msg00110.html

🤦

#infosec #ReproducibleBuilds #ReproducibleRandomNumbers

@ekaitz_zarraga That’s a good read :-) but I don’t think you need to understand the design & implementation of gexps to use them. Maybe this section is enough:
https://guix.gnu.org/manual/devel/en/html_node/G_002dExpressions.html

@emacsen @ArneBab @ekaitz_zarraga The CI tool at https://ci.guix.gnu.org (Cuirass) is set up to build everything for all the supported architectures, with the caveat that there are far fewer ARM build machines (say) than x86_64 build machines.

@ekaitz_zarraga The entry points would be the “Build Systems” and “Build Phases” sections:

https://guix.gnu.org/manual/devel/en/html_node/Build-Systems.html#index-gnu_002dbuild_002dsystem
https://guix.gnu.org/manual/devel/en/html_node/Build-Phases.html

We made an effort to make it approachable, but I gather there’s room for improvement.

@ekaitz_zarraga This is sad to hear… especially the “for nothing” part. :-/

Recently installed Guix System on a machine with slowish spinning HDDs: it would boot super slowly and you could see kernel messages scroll by slowly on tty12.

Turns out this is because syslogd (from GNU Inetutils) would ‘fsync’ after each line that gets logged, meaning we’d wait for the HDD for 0.2–0.8s after every line logged during bootup!

https://issues.guix.gnu.org/55707

(Yes, Guix System still uses a vintage syslogd—it’s dumb, but it does the job.)

My first computer: a #ZX81 won at the local supermarket!

Futuristic design, from the Sinclair logo to the flat keyboard to the cover of the programming book.

#RetroComputing

The #Guix reference card got an update!
https://guix.gnu.org/guix-refcard.pdf

Now features ‘guix shell’, ‘guix home’, and more.

@ekaitz_zarraga @jeko Then again, I’m an old fart, which is why I’m used to searching for info in manuals rather than in a search engine. :-)

(Searching for Guile stuff in a search engine is never going to work as efficiently for Guile as it does for JavaScript or C++ anyway…)

@ekaitz_zarraga @jeko Re “impossible to find”, there’s a function index, accessible by typing ‘i’ in an Info reader, and on-line at https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/html_node/Procedure-Index.html

Ideas on how to improve on that are much welcome!

@ekaitz_zarraga @jeko You’re looking at the 2.0 manual; this API hasn’t changed, but check out:
https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/html_node/Number-Input-and-Output.html

:-)

@jeko Try ‘locale-string->inexact’ from (ice-9 i18n) in a French locale:

(locale-string->inexact "3,14" (make-locale LC_ALL "fr_FR.utf8"))
⇒ 3.14

guix-forge: Deploying a software forge in a few lines of #Guix System config
https://guix-forge.systemreboot.net/

The goal is to provide an “almost stateless” forge featuring things like continuation integration, using existing tools (Laminar, cgit, etc.), so users can take control of their development. Insightful!

@publicvoit @emacsen I’m a bit of a typography nitpicker and I find it slightly disturbing when foreign-language punctuation marks are used. :-)

TIL: Use of guillemets is more widespread and varied than what I thought:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillemet#As_quotation_marks

My favorite are the right-pointing guillemets in Finnish and Swedish, »like this».

How have we come to the point where refereed scientific papers use the word “cloud” as if it had a scientific definition?

What would be the chemistry equivalent of “cloud”? “Magic potion”?