This project, its code and its substance, have been brought to you by a small but dedicated herd of passionate and possibly stubborn human beings often referred to as “hackers.” This is how it all started more than 20 years ago and it hasn’t changed! I mean, why hack an init system, with a fringe programming language (best of breed, I must say), and with cutting-edge technology if not out of a passion for the good hack? Why make it free, with participation open to all, if not to share that passion with anyone curious enough?

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The Shepherd got a new hut! The previous one was showing its age and started to feel more like a Continuously Vanishing Shed.

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Joining their companion project in its transhumance, the Shepherd and the entire herd have moved to a new home at Codeberg.

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The FOSDEM + Guix Days combo usually makes for an intense and exhaustive week, and this year’s edition was no exception! The Declarative & Minimalistic Computing track was home to a wealth of exciting talks, many of which about all things Guile—the Whippet garbage collector, the RDE Guix derivative, the Goblins distributed programming framework, and… not one but two talks about the Shepherd!

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Finally, twenty-one years after its inception (twenty-one!), the Shepherd leaves ZeroVer territory to enter a glorious 1.0 era. This 1.0.0 release is published today because we think Shepherd has become a solid tool, meeting user experience standards one has come to expect since systemd changed the game of free init systems and service managers alike. It’s also a major milestone for Guix, which has been relying on the Shepherd from a time when doing so counted as dogfooding.

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