[Nix-dev] NixOS 17.03 'Gorilla' Released

[Robin Gloster]

Dear community,

I'm proud to announce the 7th NixOS stable release 17.03 named
"Gorilla".

With over 12479 (last release: 13283) commits from 625 (last release
554) contributors the release brings a few highlights:

* Nixpkgs is now extensible through overlays. See the Nixpkgs manual for
  more information.

* This release is based on Glibc 2.25, GCC 5.4.0 and systemd 232. The
  default Linux kernel is 4.9 and Nix is at 1.11.8.

* The default desktop environment now is KDE's Plasma 5. KDE 4 has been
  removed

* The setuid wrapper functionality now supports setting capabilities.

* X.org server uses branch 1.19. Due to ABI incompatibilities,
  ati_unfree keeps forcing 1.17 and amdgpu-pro starts forcing 1.18.

* Cross compilation has been rewritten. See the nixpkgs manual for
  details. The most obvious breaking change is that in derivations there
  is no .nativeDrv nor .crossDrv and are now cross by default, not
  native.

* The overridePackages function has been rewritten to be replaced by
  overlays

* Packages in nixpkgs can be marked as insecure through listed
  vulnerabilities. See the Nixpkgs manual for more information.

There are two open issues currently:
 * gdm crashes on some hardware, using slim to start gnome works, see
the github issue for more information:
   https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/24172
 * Firefox e10s tabs crash, see the github issue for more information:
   https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/24295

See release notes for more information about major changes and updates
at http://nixos.org/nixos/manual/release-notes.html#sec-release-17.03

ISO and VirtualBox images can be downloaded from:
http://nixos.org/nixos/download.html
(Azure BLOBs and EC2 AMIs will follow)

The NixOS manual is at http://nixos.org/nixos/manual/

A fresh installation can be done by following "Installation chapter" in
the manual:

http://nixos.org/nixos/manual/index.html#sec-installation

Upgrading existing NixOS installations:

    $ nix-channel --add https://nixos.org/channels/nixos-17.03 nixos
    $ nixos-rebuild switch --upgrade

Please report issues to our bug tracker:
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues

The most active contributors for this release were:
    621 commits: Frederik Rietdijk
    498 commits: Franz Pletz
    379 commits: Vladimír Čunát
    377 commits: Thomas Tuegel
    324 commits: Joachim Fasting

And of course the regular thank you to Eelco Dolstra for his tireless
work on NixOS, Nix and all the projects around that. I'd like to thank
Domen Kožar for his help on getting this release out smoothly and his
regular work on NixOS, the security team for taking a lot of workload
off the release manager by always making sure to keep our systems and
packages secure and also Mayflower for allowing me to work on NixOS a
lot in working hours.

Also I'd like to start a discussion if we want to start rotating the
release manager for every release or maybe have two release managers
each rotating after two releases, so you always have one who has
managed one release. Any opinions? I'm not opposed to doing it again
but it needs quite some time I could also spend on other work.

PS: Note that according to our new policy, 16.09 is still supported one
month by our security team until the end of April.

Cheers,
Robin