[Nix-dev] Nix 0.6 released

[Eelco Dolstra]

Hi,

I'm pleased to announce the availability of a new stable release of the 
Nix Deployment System.  Release 0.6 can be found at

   http://catamaran.labs.cs.uu.nl/dist/nix/nix-0.6/

Here is a list of the major changes relative to release 0.5:

* Rewrite of the normalisation engine.

   * Multiple builds can now be performed in parallel (option `-j').

   * Distributed builds.  Nix can now call a shell script to forward
     builds to Nix installations on remote machines, which may or may
     not be of the same platform type.

   * Option `--fallback' allows recovery from broken substitutes.

   * Option `--keep-going' causes building of other (unaffected)
     derivations to continue if one failed.

* Improvements to the garbage collector (i.e., it should actually work
   now).

* Setuid Nix installations allow a Nix store to be shared among
   multiple users.

* Substitute registration is much faster now.

* A utility `nix-build' to build a Nix expression and create a symlink
   to the result int the current directory; useful for testing Nix
   derivations.

* Manual updates.

* `nix-env' changes:

   * Derivations for other platforms are filtered out (which can be
     overriden using `--system-filter').

   * `--install' by default now uninstall previous derivations with the
     same name.

   * `--upgrade' allows upgrading to a specific version.

   * New operation `--delete-generations' to remove profile
     generations (necessary for effective garbage collection).

   * Nicer output (sorted, columnised).

* More sensible verbosity levels all around (builder output is now
   shown always, unless `-Q' is given).

* Nix expression language changes:

   * New language construct: `with E1; E2' brings all attributes
     defined in the attribute set E1 in scope in E2.

   * Added a `map' function.

   * Various new operators (e.g., string concatenation).

* Expression evaluation is much faster.

* An Emacs mode for editing Nix expressions (with syntax highlighting
   and indentation) has been added.

* Many bug fixes.

There is also a new release of the Nix Packages collection, which can 
be found at

   http://catamaran.labs.cs.uu.nl/dist/nix/nixpkgs-0.6/

The following people contributed to Nix / NixPkgs 0.6:

Martin Bravenboer
Eelco Dolstra
Niels Janssen
Armijn Hemel
Rob Vermaas
Eelco Visser

-- 
Eelco Dolstra | http://www.cs.uu.nl/~eelco