[Nix-dev] NixOS 13.10

[Mathijs Kwik]

Congratulations on another great milestone :)
It will be interesting to see how this stable experiment goes.
But together with the new nixos-rebuild profiles, I think this will be
very smooth.

On Thu, Oct 31, 2013 at 11:59 PM, Eelco Dolstra
<eelco.dolstra at logicblox.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm pleased to announce the availability of the first stable branch of NixOS,
> namely 13.10 (a.k.a "Aardvark")!  The purpose of this branch is to receive only
> conservative changes, such as bug fixes, "safe" minor package upgrades and new
> packages [1].  This is important for people who want to use NixOS in a
> production environment: you do want to get (security) fixes, but you don't want
> to be afraid of the system changing in fundamental ways, as may be the case on
> the master branch.
>
> Note that NixOS 13.10 is a branch, not a "release" in the sense of a static
> revision.  Just like the NixOS master branch, it receives updates, just safer
> ones.  The idea is to maintain this branch at least until the next stable branch
> (14.04?) is created.
>
> The 13.10 branch lives here in GitHub:
>
>   https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/tree/release-13.10
>
> It also has an associated channel:
>
>   http://nixos.org/channels/nixos-13.10
>
> (Notice that versions of releases in the 13.10 channel have no "pre" string,
> indicating they're stable versions, such as 13.10.35427.6fda96b.)
>
> If you want to switch an existing machine from the nixos-unstable channel over
> to the 13.10 channel, just do:
>
>   $ nix-channel --add http://nixos.org/channels/nixos-13.10 nixos
>
> After this, subsequent calls to "nixos-rebuild switch --upgrade" will fetch from
> the nixos-13.10 channel.  See here for details on switching between NixOS channels:
>
>   http://nixos.org/nixos/manual/#sec-upgrading
>
> Like the nixos-unstable channel (which gets build from the master branch), the
> 13.10 channel is updated only after Hydra has built all packages and all
> release-critical tests have succeeded.  The Hydra jobset is:
>
>   http://hydra.nixos.org/jobset/nixos/release-13.10
>
> and the status of the release-critical jobs can be seen here:
>
>   http://hydra.nixos.org/job/nixos/release-13.10/tested#tabs-constituents
>
> The plan for maintaining the branch is that it will primarily receive
> cherry-picked commits from master.  Other than that, doing a stable branch is an
> experiment, and we'll have to see what the best way to do it is.  Any
> feedback/suggestions are welcome.
>
> On that topic, now is probably a good time to start thinking about what the next
> release should look like, in terms of features.  If you have any features
> (especially potentially high-impact ones like upgrading GCC) that you would like
> to see, please create GitHub issues for them, and add them to the 14.0x milestone:
>
>   https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues?milestone=4&state=open
>
> [1] New major versions of existing packages are also fine as long as they are
> marked as "lowPrio" in all-packages.nix.  That is, "nix-env -i package" should
> continue to install the old version.
>
> --
> Eelco Dolstra | LogicBlox, Inc. | http://nixos.org/~eelco/
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