[Nix-dev] Nix 0.13 released

[Eelco Dolstra]

Hi,

I'm pleased to announce the availability of a new stable release of the
Nix package manager.  Release 0.13 can be found at

  http://hydra.nixos.org/release/nix/nix-0.13

*** Release notes ***

The release notes can also be found at
http://hydra.nixos.org/build/118589/download/3/release-notes/.

This is primarily a bug fix release. It has some new features:

  * Syntactic sugar for writing nested attribute sets. Instead of

    {
      foo = {
        bar = 123;
        xyzzy = true;
      };
      a = { b = { c = "d"; }; };
    }

    you can write

    {
      foo.bar = 123;
      foo.xyzzy = true;
      a.b.c = "d";
    }

    This is useful, for instance, in NixOS configuration files.

  * Support for Nix channels generated by Hydra, the Nix-based continuous build
    system. (Hydra generates NAR archives on the fly, so the size and hash of
    these archives isn't known in advance.)

  * Support i686-linux builds directly on x86_64-linux Nix installations. This
    is implemented using the personality() syscall, which causes uname to
    return i686 in child processes.

  * Various improvements to the chroot support. Building in a chroot works
    quite well now.

  * Nix no longer blocks if it tries to build a path and another process is
    already building the same path. Instead it tries to build another buildable
    path first. This improves parallelism.

  * Support for large (> 4 GiB) files in NAR archives.

  * Various (performance) improvements to the remote build mechanism.

  * New primops: builtins.addErrorContext (to add a string to stack traces -
    useful for debugging), builtins.isBool, builtins.isString, builtins.isInt,
    builtins.intersectAttrs.

  * OpenSolaris support (Sander van der Burg).

  * Stack traces are no longer displayed unless the --show-trace option is
    used.

  * The scoping rules for inherit (e) ... in recursive attribute sets have
    changed. The expression e can now refer to the attributes defined in the
    containing set.

-- 
Eelco Dolstra | http://www.st.ewi.tudelft.nl/~dolstra/