Simon Josefsson: Guix on Trisquel & Ubuntu for Reproducible CI/CD Artifacts
Last week I published Guix on Debian container images that prepared for today s announcement of Guix on Trisquel/Ubuntu container images.
I have published images with reasonably modern Guix for Trisquel 11 aramo, Trisquel 12 ecne, Ubuntu 22.04 and Ubuntu 24.04. The Ubuntu images are available for both amd64 and arm64, but unfortunately Trisquel arm64 containers aren t available yet so they are only for amd64. Images for ppc64el and riscv64 are work in progress. The currently supported container names:
registry.gitlab.com/debdistutils/guix/guix-on-dpkg:trisquel11-guix
registry.gitlab.com/debdistutils/guix/guix-on-dpkg:trisquel12-guix
registry.gitlab.com/debdistutils/guix/guix-on-dpkg:ubuntu22.04-guix
registry.gitlab.com/debdistutils/guix/guix-on-dpkg:ubuntu24.04-guix
Or you prefer guix-on-dpkg on Docker Hub:
docker.io/jas4711/guix-on-dpkg:trisquel11-guix
docker.io/jas4711/guix-on-dpkg:trisquel12-guix
docker.io/jas4711/guix-on-dpkg:ubuntu22.04-guix
docker.io/jas4711/guix-on-dpkg:ubuntu24.04-guix
You may use them as follows. See the guix-on-dpkg README for how to start guix-daemon and installing packages.
jas@kaka:~$ podman run -it --hostname guix --rm registry.gitlab.com/debdistutils/guix/guix-on-dpkg:trisquel11-guix
root@guix:/# head -1 /etc/os-release
NAME="Trisquel GNU/Linux"
root@guix:/# guix describe
guix 136fc8b
repository URL: https://gitlab.com/debdistutils/guix/mirror.git
branch: master
commit: 136fc8bfe91a64d28b6c54cf8f5930ffe787c16e
root@guix:/#
You may now be asking yourself: why? Fear not, gentle reader, because having two container images of roughly similar software is a great tool for attempting to build software artifacts reproducible, and comparing the result to spot differences. Obviously.
I have been using this pattern to get reproducible tarball artifacts of several software releases for around a year and half, since libntlm 1.8.
Let s walk through how to setup a CI/CD pipeline that will build a piece of software, in four different jobs for Trisquel 11/12 and Ubuntu 22.04/24.04. I am in the process of learning Codeberg/Forgejo CI/CD, so I am still using GitLab CI/CD here, but the concepts should be the same regardless of platform. Let s start by defining a job skeleton:
.guile-gnutls: &guile-gnutls
before_script:
- /root/.config/guix/current/bin/guix-daemon --version
- env LC_ALL=C.UTF-8 /root/.config/guix/current/bin/guix-daemon --build-users-group=guixbuild $GUIX_DAEMON_ARGS &
- GUIX_PROFILE=/root/.config/guix/current; . "$GUIX_PROFILE/etc/profile"
- type guix
- guix --version
- guix describe
- time guix install --verbosity=0 wget gcc-toolchain autoconf automake libtool gnutls guile pkg-config
- time apt-get update
- time apt-get install -y make git texinfo
- GUIX_PROFILE="/root/.guix-profile"; . "$GUIX_PROFILE/etc/profile"
script:
- git clone https://codeberg.org/guile-gnutls/guile-gnutls.git
- cd guile-gnutls
- git checkout v5.0.1
- ./bootstrap
- ./configure
- make V=1
- make V=1 check VERBOSE=t
- make V=1 dist
after_script:
- mkdir -pv out/$CI_JOB_NAME_SLUG/src
- mv -v guile-gnutls/*-src.tar.* out/$CI_JOB_NAME_SLUG/src/
- mv -v guile-gnutls/*.tar.* out/$CI_JOB_NAME_SLUG/
artifacts:
paths:
- out/**
This installs some packages, clones guile-gnutls (it could be any project, that s just an example), build it and return tarball artifacts. The artifacts are the git-archive and make dist tarballs.
Let s instantiate the skeleton into four jobs, running the Trisquel 11/12 jobs on amd64 and the Ubuntu 22.04/24.04 jobs on arm64 for fun.
guile-gnutls-trisquel11-amd64:
tags: [ saas-linux-medium-amd64 ]
image: registry.gitlab.com/debdistutils/guix/guix-on-dpkg:trisquel11-guix
extends: .guile-gnutls
guile-gnutls-ubuntu22.04-arm64:
tags: [ saas-linux-medium-arm64 ]
image: registry.gitlab.com/debdistutils/guix/guix-on-dpkg:ubuntu22.04-guix
extends: .guile-gnutls
guile-gnutls-trisquel12-amd64:
tags: [ saas-linux-medium-amd64 ]
image: registry.gitlab.com/debdistutils/guix/guix-on-dpkg:trisquel12-guix
extends: .guile-gnutls
guile-gnutls-ubuntu24.04-arm64:
tags: [ saas-linux-medium-arm64 ]
image: registry.gitlab.com/debdistutils/guix/guix-on-dpkg:ubuntu24.04-guix
extends: .guile-gnutls
Running this pipeline will result in artifacts that you want to confirm for reproducibility. Let s add a pipeline job to do the comparison:
guile-gnutls-compare:
image: alpine:latest
needs: [ guile-gnutls-trisquel11-amd64,
guile-gnutls-trisquel12-amd64,
guile-gnutls-ubuntu22.04-arm64,
guile-gnutls-ubuntu24.04-arm64 ]
script:
- cd out
- sha256sum */*.tar.* */*/*.tar.* sort grep -- -src.tar.
- sha256sum */*.tar.* */*/*.tar.* sort grep -v -- -src.tar.
- sha256sum */*.tar.* */*/*.tar.* sort uniq -c -w64 sort -rn
- sha256sum */*.tar.* */*/*.tar.* grep -- -src.tar. sort uniq -c -w64 grep -v '^ 1 '
- sha256sum */*.tar.* */*/*.tar.* grep -v -- -src.tar. sort uniq -c -w64 grep -v '^ 1 '
# Confirm modern git-archive tarball reproducibility
- cmp guile-gnutls-trisquel12-amd64/src/*.tar.gz guile-gnutls-ubuntu24-04-arm64/src/*.tar.gz
# Confirm old git-archive (export-subst but long git describe) tarball reproducibility
- cmp guile-gnutls-trisquel11-amd64/src/*.tar.gz guile-gnutls-ubuntu22-04-arm64/src/*.tar.gz
# Confirm 'make dist' generated tarball reproducibility
- cmp guile-gnutls-trisquel11-amd64/*.tar.gz guile-gnutls-ubuntu22-04-arm64/*.tar.gz
- cmp guile-gnutls-trisquel12-amd64/*.tar.gz guile-gnutls-ubuntu24-04-arm64/*.tar.gz
artifacts:
when: always
paths:
- ./out/**
Look how beautiful, almost like ASCII art! The commands print SHA256 checksums of the artifacts, sorted in a couple of ways, and then proceeds to compare relevant artifacts. What would the output of such a run be, you may wonder? You can look for yourself in the guix-on-dpkg pipeline but here is the gist of it:
$ cd out
$ sha256sum */*.tar.* */*/*.tar.* sort grep -- -src.tar.
79bc24143ba083819b36822eacb8f9e15a15a543e1257c53d30204e9ffec7aca guile-gnutls-trisquel11-amd64/src/guile-gnutls-v5.0.1-src.tar.gz
79bc24143ba083819b36822eacb8f9e15a15a543e1257c53d30204e9ffec7aca guile-gnutls-ubuntu22-04-arm64/src/guile-gnutls-v5.0.1-src.tar.gz
b190047cee068f6b22a5e8d49ca49a2425ad4593901b9ac8940f8842ba7f164f guile-gnutls-trisquel12-amd64/src/guile-gnutls-v5.0.1-src.tar.gz
b190047cee068f6b22a5e8d49ca49a2425ad4593901b9ac8940f8842ba7f164f guile-gnutls-ubuntu24-04-arm64/src/guile-gnutls-v5.0.1-src.tar.gz
$ sha256sum */*.tar.* */*/*.tar.* sort grep -v -- -src.tar.
1e8d107ad534b85f30e432d5c98bf599aab5d8db5f996c2530aabe91f203018a guile-gnutls-trisquel11-amd64/guile-gnutls-5.0.1.tar.gz
1e8d107ad534b85f30e432d5c98bf599aab5d8db5f996c2530aabe91f203018a guile-gnutls-ubuntu22-04-arm64/guile-gnutls-5.0.1.tar.gz
bc2df2d868f141bca5f3625aa146aa0f24871f6dcf0b48ff497eba3bb5219b84 guile-gnutls-trisquel12-amd64/guile-gnutls-5.0.1.tar.gz
bc2df2d868f141bca5f3625aa146aa0f24871f6dcf0b48ff497eba3bb5219b84 guile-gnutls-ubuntu24-04-arm64/guile-gnutls-5.0.1.tar.gz
$ sha256sum */*.tar.* */*/*.tar.* sort uniq -c -w64 sort -rn
2 bc2df2d868f141bca5f3625aa146aa0f24871f6dcf0b48ff497eba3bb5219b84 guile-gnutls-trisquel12-amd64/guile-gnutls-5.0.1.tar.gz
2 b190047cee068f6b22a5e8d49ca49a2425ad4593901b9ac8940f8842ba7f164f guile-gnutls-trisquel12-amd64/src/guile-gnutls-v5.0.1-src.tar.gz
2 79bc24143ba083819b36822eacb8f9e15a15a543e1257c53d30204e9ffec7aca guile-gnutls-trisquel11-amd64/src/guile-gnutls-v5.0.1-src.tar.gz
2 1e8d107ad534b85f30e432d5c98bf599aab5d8db5f996c2530aabe91f203018a guile-gnutls-trisquel11-amd64/guile-gnutls-5.0.1.tar.gz
$ sha256sum */*.tar.* */*/*.tar.* grep -- -src.tar. sort uniq -c -w64 grep -v '^ 1 '
2 79bc24143ba083819b36822eacb8f9e15a15a543e1257c53d30204e9ffec7aca guile-gnutls-trisquel11-amd64/src/guile-gnutls-v5.0.1-src.tar.gz
2 b190047cee068f6b22a5e8d49ca49a2425ad4593901b9ac8940f8842ba7f164f guile-gnutls-trisquel12-amd64/src/guile-gnutls-v5.0.1-src.tar.gz
$ sha256sum */*.tar.* */*/*.tar.* grep -v -- -src.tar. sort uniq -c -w64 grep -v '^ 1 '
2 1e8d107ad534b85f30e432d5c98bf599aab5d8db5f996c2530aabe91f203018a guile-gnutls-trisquel11-amd64/guile-gnutls-5.0.1.tar.gz
2 bc2df2d868f141bca5f3625aa146aa0f24871f6dcf0b48ff497eba3bb5219b84 guile-gnutls-trisquel12-amd64/guile-gnutls-5.0.1.tar.gz
$ cmp guile-gnutls-trisquel12-amd64/src/*.tar.gz guile-gnutls-ubuntu24-04-arm64/src/*.tar.gz
$ cmp guile-gnutls-trisquel11-amd64/src/*.tar.gz guile-gnutls-ubuntu22-04-arm64/src/*.tar.gz
$ cmp guile-gnutls-trisquel11-amd64/*.tar.gz guile-gnutls-ubuntu22-04-arm64/*.tar.gz
$ cmp guile-gnutls-trisquel12-amd64/*.tar.gz guile-gnutls-ubuntu24-04-arm64/*.tar.gz
That s it for today, but stay tuned for more updates on using Guix in containers, and remember; Happy Hacking!
A new release of the still-recent
I am a huge fan of Git, as I have witnessed how it has made software development so much more productive compared to the pre-2010s era. I wish all Debian source code were in Git to reap the full benefits.
Git is not perfect, as it requires significant effort to learn properly, and the ecosystem is complex with even more things to learn ranging from cryptographic signatures and commit hooks to Git-assisted code review best practices, forge websites, and CI systems.
Sure, there is still room to optimize its use, but Git certainly has proven itself and is now the industry standard. Thus, some readers might be surprised to learn that Debian development in 2025 is not actually based on Git. In Debian, the version control is done by the Debian archive itself. Each commit is a new upload to the archive, and the commit message is the
Having learnt that
Last week, our university held a Mega Vaccination Center . Things cannot
be small or regular with my university, ever! According to the official
information, during last week 31,000 people were given a total of 74,000
vaccine dosis against influenza, COVID-19, pneumococcal disease and measles
(specific vaccines for each person selected according to an age profile).
I was a tiny blip in said numbers. One person, three shots. Took me three
hours, but am quite happy to have been among the huge crowd.


After cartridge pleating and honeycombing, I was still somewhat in the
mood for that kind of fabric manipulation, and directing my internet
searches in that vague direction, and I stumbled on this:
With the pieces being rectangles the width of the fabric, I was able to
have at least one side of selvedge on all seams, and took advantage of it
by finishing the seams by simply folding the allowances to one sides so
that the selvedge was on top, and hemstitching them down as I would have
done with a folded edge when felling.
Also, at first I wanted to make the smocking in white on white, but then
I thought about a few hanks of electric blue floss I had in my stash,
and decided to just go with it.
The initial seams were quickly made, then I started the smocking at the
neck, and at that time the project went on hold while I got ready to go
to DebConf. Then I came back and took some time to get back into a
sewing mood, but finally the smocking on the next was finished, and I
could go on with the main sewing, which, as I expected, went decently
fast for a handsewing project.
While doing the diagonal smocking on the collar I counted the stitches
to make each side the same length, which didn t completely work because
the gathers weren t that regular to start with, and started each line
from the two front opening going towards the center back, leaving a
triangle with a different size right in the middle. I think overall it
worked well enough.
Then there were a few more interruptions, but at last it was ready! just
as the weather turned cold-ish and puffy shirts were no longer in
season, but it will be there for me next spring.
I did manage to wear it a few times and I have to say that the neck
shaping is quite comfortable indeed: it doesn t pull in odd ways like
the classical historically accurate pirate shirt sometimes does, and the
heavy gathering at the neck makes it feel padded and soft.
I m not as happy with the cuffs: the way I did them with just
honeycombing means that they don t need a closure, and after washing and
a bit of steaming they lie nicely, but then they tend to relax in a
wider shape. The next time I think I ll leave a slit in the sleeves,
possibly make a different type of smocking (depending on whether I have
enough fabric) and then line them like the neck so that they are stable.
Because, yes, I think that there will be another time: I have a few more
project before that, and I want to spend maybe another year working from
my stash, but then I think I ll buy some soft linen and make at least
another one, maybe with white-on-white smocking so that it will be
easier to match with different garments.
I haven't been blogging as much as I used to. For a while, I've been hosting my
blog on a single-core DigitalOcean droplet, which cost me around $7 per month.
It also hosted my mail server. Most of the time, the droplet was idle, and I
wasn't actively using my personal email much. Since it was self-hosted, I didn't
have confidence that it would always be up, so I relied on Gmail as my personal
email for everything from banking to social media.
Now, I feel this cost is just a waste of money, even though it's not huge. So, I
decided to move my blog back to GitHub Pages, now published using GitHub
Workflows. I've stopped my mail server for the time being, and it won't be
reachable for a while. For any personal queries or comments, please reach me on
my
When I started looking at 