Source Code Archiving to the Rescue of Reproducible Deployment

Fuente: arXiv
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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Courtès, Ludovic, Sample, Timothy, Tournier, Simon, Zacchiroli, Stefano
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Courtès, Ludovic
Sample, Timothy
Tournier, Simon
Zacchiroli, Stefano
author_facet Courtès, Ludovic
Sample, Timothy
Tournier, Simon
Zacchiroli, Stefano
contents The ability to verify research results and to experiment with methodologies are core tenets of science. As research results are increasingly the outcome of computational processes, software plays a central role. GNU Guix is a software deployment tool that supports reproducible software deployment, making it a foundation for computational research workflows. To achieve reproducibility, we must first ensure the source code of software packages Guix deploys remains available.We describe our work connecting Guix with Software Heritage, the universal source code archive, making Guix the first free software distribution and tool backed by a stable archive. Our contribution is twofold: we explain the rationale and present the design and implementation we came up with; second, we report on the archival coverage for package source code with data collected over five years and discuss remaining challenges.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_15516
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Source Code Archiving to the Rescue of Reproducible Deployment
Courtès, Ludovic
Sample, Timothy
Tournier, Simon
Zacchiroli, Stefano
Software Engineering
The ability to verify research results and to experiment with methodologies are core tenets of science. As research results are increasingly the outcome of computational processes, software plays a central role. GNU Guix is a software deployment tool that supports reproducible software deployment, making it a foundation for computational research workflows. To achieve reproducibility, we must first ensure the source code of software packages Guix deploys remains available.We describe our work connecting Guix with Software Heritage, the universal source code archive, making Guix the first free software distribution and tool backed by a stable archive. Our contribution is twofold: we explain the rationale and present the design and implementation we came up with; second, we report on the archival coverage for package source code with data collected over five years and discuss remaining challenges.
title Source Code Archiving to the Rescue of Reproducible Deployment
topic Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.15516