Source Code Archiving to the Rescue of Reproducible Deployment
Abstract
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.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2405.15516,
title = {Source Code Archiving to the Rescue of Reproducible Deployment},
author = {Ludovic Courtès and Timothy Sample and Simon Tournier and Stefano Zacchiroli},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.15516},
year = {2024}
}
Comments
2024 ACM Conference on Reproducibility and Replicability, Jun 2024, Rennes, France