It is possible to contribute to improving #guix as the need for new functionalities, packages, fixes or upgrades arise. This is one of the strongest points in open communities: the possibility to participate on the development and continuous improvement of the tool. Let’s see how it goes when it comes to guix.
How to seek, detect, be notified, analyze logs, understand and react to the different possible kind of issues one may encounter in a digital design is a vast topic of research, well beyond the scope of this modest post. But there are a couple of things we may state about here, though: automatizing issue detection is the way to go. Continuous integration (#ci) testing is a practice to adopt in #modernhw as a way to ensure that our design complies with its constraints. Let’s see this in more detail.
Putting new ideas in community, exchanging opinions, replying to someone's else impressions, sharing public experiences, showing feelings about modern way of living, writing down notes on what’s going on from one’s side ... So many interesting and useful content around to share. The question is, how to do so simply and without complications ? How not to expend way too much time messing with tooling ? Is it yet possible to concentrate on what really matters, contents ? Here I summarize the way I’ve found to contribute to this blog, which fits best with my workflow.
Creating something new from scratch implies a certain ratio of unpredictable issues (loosely defined in the scope of this post: new errors, regressions, warnings, ... any unexpected behavior one may encounter). Most important, a digital design developer needs to define somehow what he considers to be a project issue, before even thinking about how to react to it. Luckily, in #modernhw a few usual tools are available to ease the process as a whole. Let’s overview some of them.
Guix reveals as a practical means of handling dependencies. However, the amount of information available to start using it may appear as a bit overwhelming for a beginner, letting the feeling of a tool reserved to a reduced community or experts. Far from that. Here you’ll find everything you need to get started with guix, with a light touch on using it for #modernhw.
#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.
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.
