Source Code Archiving to the Rescue of Reproducible Deployment

TL;DR

This paper discusses integrating GNU Guix with the Software Heritage archive to enhance reproducibility in computational research by ensuring source code availability and analyzing five years of archival coverage.

Contribution

We present the design and implementation of connecting Guix with Software Heritage, making Guix the first free software distribution backed by a stable source code archive.

Findings

Five years of archival data collected and analyzed.

Guix is now the first free software distribution supported by a stable archive.

Remaining challenges in source code archival are discussed.

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.