Guix + Software Heritage: Source Code Archiving to the Rescue of Reproducible Deployment

What's Guix? GNU Guix is a software deployment tool that supports reproducible software deployment. As research results are increasingly the outcome of computational processes, software plays a central role. The ability to verify research results and to experiment with methodologies, core tenets of the scientific methods, requires reproducible software deployment.

What's Software Heritage? Software Heritage is a long term, non-profit, multistakeholder initiative with the ambitious goal to collect, preserve and share all source code publicly available. To our knowledge, Software Heritage is the largest publicly available archive of software source code.

Could we connect Guix with Software Heritage? Yes! It makes Guix the first free software distribution and tool backed by Software Heritage, to our knowledge.

This presentation describes design and implementation we came up and reports on the archival coverage for package source code with data collected over five years. It opens to some remaining challenges toward a better open and reproducible research.