csantosb

Everything you need to get started with sourcehut, an original and interesting #gitforge .

#modernhw, and in particular digital electronics design implies, for the most of it, writing #plaintext files. Creating code, scripts, configurations, documentation, emails, taking notes, handling bibliographic references, etc., all of these tasks involve writing in plain text files. Whether these files are created or modified, editing plain text is a must. An, when it comes to editing text, it is really worth investing some time on learning a bit more than the basics of a good text editor.

Digital hardware design implies dealing with a lot of scripts, configurations, packages, project files, documentation, specifications, bibliographies, data sheets, software, etc. and, of course, a lot of code. Each one comes with its own version history. This is not a problem, as we have #git. But when it comes to #dependencies between different sets, how do we handle the complexity ?

As one understands with time and a bit of experience, keeping track of the whole bunch of #dependencies necessary to handle daily when doing digital hardware design may reveal as an error-prone task. And yet, this is not to speak about regressions, incompatibilities and most important, #reproducibility of results. Luckyly enough, this is precisely the problem that #guix intends to solve, in an elegant, minimalistic and open way, using only #freesoftware.

#guix includes the concept of channels, or git repositories of package definitions. This gives a chance for anyone to complete the collection of packages provided by the distribution, in case this is not enough. Keep reading for an intro on how to create your own channels, or how to use the most popular third party guix channels around.

Once upon a time, in digital electronics design, we were used to moving huge zip files around including project data, code and all ancillary stuff along with it. We were doing backups, snapshots and versioning our code with help of compressed files. That’s the way it was, I knew that time, and you, young reader, would not believe me if I told you about the whole picture. This is not acceptable anymore.