[Nix-dev] Nix 1.8 released

[Eelco Dolstra]

Hi,

I'm pleased to announce the availability of a new stable release of the
Nix package manager.  Release 1.8 can be found at

  http://hydra.nixos.org/release/nix/nix-1.8

and

  http://nixos.org/releases/nix/nix-1.8

It has the following changes and new features:

  • Breaking change: to address a race condition, the remote build hook
    mechanism now uses nix-store --serve on the remote machine. This requires
    build slaves to be updated to Nix 1.8.

  • Nix now uses HTTPS instead of HTTP to access the default binary cache,
    cache.nixos.org.

  • nix-env selectors are now regular expressions. For instance, you can do

    $ nix-env -qa '.*zip.*'

    to query all packages with a name containing zip.

  • nix-store --read-log can now fetch remote build logs. If a build log is not
    available locally, then ‘nix-store -l’ will now try to download it from the
    servers listed in the ‘log-servers’ option in nix.conf. For instance, if
    you have the configuration option

    log-servers = http://hydra.nixos.org/log

    then it will try to get logs from http://hydra.nixos.org/log/base name of
    the store path. This allows you to do things like:

    $ nix-store -l $(which xterm)

    and get a log even if xterm wasn't built locally.

  • New builtin functions: attrValues, deepSeq, fromJSON, readDir, seq.

  • nix-instantiate --eval now has a --json flag to print the resulting value
    in JSON format.

  • nix-copy-closure now uses nix-store --serve on the remote side to send or
    receive closures. This fixes a race condition between nix-copy-closureE and
    the garbage collector.

  • Derivations can specify the new special attribute allowedRequisites, which
    has a similar meaning to allowedReferences. But instead of only enforcing
    to explicitly specify the immediate references, it requires the derivation
    to specify all the dependencies recursively (hence the name, requisites)
    that are used by the resulting output.

  • On Mac OS X, Nix now handles case collisions when importing closures from
    case-sensitive file systems. This is mostly useful for running NixOps on
    Mac OS X.

  • The Nix daemon has new configuration options allowed-users (specifying the
    users and groups that are allowed to connect to the daemon) and
    trusted-users (specifying the users and groups that can perform privileged
    operations like specifying untrusted binary caches).

  • The configuration option build-max-jobs now defaults to the number of
    available CPU cores.

  • Build users are now used by default when Nix is invoked as root. This
    prevents builds from accidentally running as root.

  • Nix now includes systemd units and Upstart jobs.

  • Speed improvements to nix-store --optimise.

  • Language change: the == operator now ignores string contexts (the
    “dependencies” of a string).

  • Nix now filters out Nix-specific ANSI escape sequences on standard error.
    They are supposed to be invisible, but some terminals show them anyway.

  • Various commands now automatically pipe their output into the pager as
    specified by the PAGER environment variable.

  • Several improvements to reduce memory consumption in the evaluator.

This release has contributions from Adam Szkoda, Aristid Breitkreuz, Bob van der
Linden, Charles Strahan, darealshinji, Eelco Dolstra, Gergely Risko, Joel
Taylor, Ludovic Courtès, Marko Durkovic, Mikey Ariel, Paul Colomiets, Ricardo M.
Correia, Ricky Elrod, Robert Helgesson, Rob Vermaas, Russell O'Connor, Shea
Levy, Shell Turner, Sönke Hahn, Steve Purcell, Vladimír Čunát and Wout Mertens.

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