[Nix-dev] Nix 1.1 released

[Eelco Dolstra]

Hi,

I'm pleased to announce the availability of a new stable release of the
Nix package manager.  Release 1.1 can be found at

  http://hydra.nixos.org/release/nix/nix-1.1

This release has the following improvements:

  * On Linux, when doing a chroot build, Nix now uses various namespace
    features provided by the Linux kernel to improve build isolation. Namely:

      o The private network namespace ensures that builders cannot talk to the
        outside world (or vice versa): each build only sees a private loopback
        interface. This also means that two concurrent builds can listen on the
        same port (e.g. as part of a test) without conflicting with each other.

      o The PID namespace causes each build to start as PID 1. Processes
        outside of the chroot are not visible to those on the inside. On the
        other hand, processes inside the chroot are visible from the outside
        (though with different PIDs).

      o The IPC namespace prevents the builder from communicating with outside
        processes using SysV IPC mechanisms (shared memory, message queues,
        semaphores). It also ensures that all IPC objects are destroyed when
        the builder exits.

      o The UTS namespace ensures that builders see a hostname of localhost
        rather than the actual hostname.

      o The private mount namespace was already used by Nix to ensure that the
        bind-mounts used to set up the chroot are cleaned up automatically.

  * Build logs are now compressed using bzip2. The command nix-store -l
    decompresses them on the fly. This can be disabled by setting the option
    build-compress-log to false.

  * The creation of build logs in /nix/var/log/nix/drvs can be disabled by
    setting the new option build-keep-log to false. This is useful, for
    instance, for Hydra build machines.

  * Nix now reserves some space in /nix/var/nix/db/reserved to ensure that the
    garbage collector can run successfully if the disk is full. This is
    necessary because SQLite transactions fail if the disk is full.

  * Added a basic fetchurl function. This is not intended to replace the
    fetchurl in Nixpkgs, but is useful for bootstrapping; e.g., it will allow
    us to get rid of the bootstrap binaries in the Nixpkgs source tree and
    download them instead. You can use it by doing import <nix/fetchurl.nix> {
    url = url; sha256 = "hash"; }. (Shea Levy)

  * Improved RPM spec file. (Michel Alexandre Salim)

  * Support for on-demand socket-based activation in the Nix daemon with
    systemd.

  * Added a manpage for nix.conf(5).

-- 
Eelco Dolstra | LogicBlox, Inc. | http://nixos.org/~eelco/