[Nix-dev] Nix 1.7 released
Eelco Dolstra
eelco.dolstra at logicblox.com
Fri Apr 11 12:36:00 CEST 2014
Hi all,
I'm pleased to announce the availability of a new stable release of the
Nix package manager. Release 1.7 can be found at
http://hydra.nixos.org/release/nix/nix-1.7
and
http://nixos.org/releases/nix/nix-1.7
In addition to the usual bug fixes, this release has the following new
features:
* Antiquotation is now allowed inside of quoted attribute names (e.g. set."$
{foo}"). In the case where the attribute name is just a single
antiquotation, the quotes can be dropped (e.g. the above example can be
written set.${foo}). If an attribute name inside of a set declaration
evaluates to null (e.g. { ${null} = false; }), then that attribute is not
added to the set.
* Experimental support for cryptographically signed binary caches. See the
commit for details.
* An experimental new substituter, download-via-ssh, that fetches binaries
from remote machines via SSH. Specifying the flags --option
use-ssh-substituter true --option ssh-substituter-hosts user at hostname will
cause Nix to download binaries from the specified machine, if it has them.
* nix-store -r and nix-build have a new flag, --check, that builds a
previously built derivation again, and prints an error message if the
output is not exactly the same. This helps to verify whether a derivation
is truly deterministic. For example:
$ nix-build '<nixpkgs>' -A patchelf
…
$ nix-build '<nixpkgs>' -A patchelf --check
…
error: derivation `/nix/store/1ipvxs…-patchelf-0.6' may not be
deterministic: hash mismatch in output
`/nix/store/4pc1dm…-patchelf-0.6.drv'
* The nix-instantiate flags --eval-only and --parse-only have been renamed to
--eval and --parse, respectively.
* nix-instantiate, nix-build and nix-shell now have a flag --expr (or -E)
that allows you to specify the expression to be evaluated as a command line
argument. For instance, nix-instantiate --eval -E '1 + 2' will print 3.
* nix-shell improvements:
- It has a new flag, --packages (or -p), that sets up a build environment
containing the specified packages from Nixpkgs. For example, the
command
$ nix-shell -p sqlite xorg.libX11 hello
will start a shell in which the given packages are present.
- It now uses shell.nix as the default expression, falling back to
default.nix if the former doesn’t exist. This makes it convenient to
have a shell.nix in your project to set up a nice development
environment.
- It evaluates the derivation attribute shellHook, if set. Since stdenv
does not normally execute this hook, it allows you to do nix-shell
-specific setup.
- It preserves the user’s timezone setting.
* In chroots, Nix now sets up a /dev containing only a minimal set of devices
(such as /dev/null). Note that it only does this if you don’t have /dev
listed in your build-chroot-dirs setting; otherwise, it will bind-mount the
/dev from outside the chroot.
Similarly, if you don’t have /dev/pts listed in build-chroot-dirs, Nix will
mount a private devpts filesystem on the chroot’s /dev/pts.
* New built-in function: builtins.toJSON, which returns a JSON representation
of a value.
* nix-env -q has a new flag --json to print a JSON representation of the
installed or available packages.
* nix-env now supports meta attributes with more complex values, such as
attribute sets.
* The -A flag now allows attribute names with dots in them, e.g.
$ nix-instantiate --eval '<nixos>' \
-A 'config.systemd.units."nscd.service".text'
* The --max-freed option to nix-store --gc now accepts a unit specifier. For
example, nix-store --gc --max-freed 1G will free up to 1 gigabyte of disk
space.
* nix-collect-garbage has a new flag --delete-older-than Nd, which deletes
all user environment generations older than N days. Likewise, nix-env
--delete-generations accepts a Nd age limit.
* Nix now heuristically detects whether a build failure was due to a
disk-full condition. In that case, the build is not flagged as “permanently
failed”. This is mostly useful for Hydra, which needs to distinguish
between permanent and transient build failures.
* There is a new symbol __curPos that expands to an attribute set containing
its file name and line and column numbers, e.g. { file = "foo.nix"; line =
10; column = 5; }. There also is a new builtin function, unsafeGetAttrPos,
that returns the position of an attribute. This is used by Nixpkgs to
provide location information in error messages, e.g.
$ nix-build '<nixpkgs>' -A libreoffice --argstr system x86_64-darwin
error: the package ‘libreoffice-4.0.5.2’ in
‘.../applications/office/libreoffice/default.nix:263’
is not supported on ‘x86_64-darwin’
* The garbage collector is now more concurrent with other Nix processes
because it releases certain locks earlier.
* The binary tarball installer has been improved. You can now install Nix by
running:
$ bash <(curl https://nixos.org/nix/install)
* More evaluation errors include position information. For instance,
selecting a missing attribute will print something like
error: attribute `nixUnstabl' missing, at
/etc/nixos/configurations/misc/eelco/mandark.nix:216:15
* The command nix-setuid-helper is gone.
* Nix no longer uses Automake, but instead has a non-recursive, GNU
Make-based build system.
* All installed libraries now have the prefix libnix. In particular, this
gets rid of libutil, which could clash with libraries with the same name
from other packages.
* Nix now requires a compiler that supports C++11.
This release has contributions from Danny Wilson, Domen Kožar, Eelco Dolstra,
Ian-Woo Kim, Ludovic Courtès, Maxim Ivanov, Petr Rockai, Ricardo M. Correia and
Shea Levy.
--
Eelco Dolstra | LogicBlox, Inc. | http://nixos.org/~eelco/
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