This presentation illustrates how the Guix project provides software deployment for reproducible research. GNU Guix takes care about the computational environment from the package management to producing container (Docker, Singularity) and also being an alternative for virtual environment.
Open science means transparent and collective; transparent because a scientific result needs to be scrutinized and studied bug-to-bug, and collective because an independent observer must observe the same result–at least when speaking about computational processing–and this observation needs to be sustainable. Guix is an attempt to implement, for the computational environment, these two items.
By applying functional programming concepts to package management, pioneered by Nix, Guix is deeply transparent by design. The whole computational environment is captured and its inspection, from source code to binary, becomes tractable. As a nice consequence, this computational environment is reproducible from one machine to another. What about missing source code? Guix is able to transparently fallback to the Software Heritage archive. The reproduction of this computational environment becomes sustainable–to some extent.
In short, this presentation try to convince how Guix and 3 command lines can helps open science.
Speakers: Simon Tournier