[Nix-dev] NixOS 13.10

[Eelco Dolstra]

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/