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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<article xmlns="http://docbook.org/ns/docbook"
xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">
<title>Nixpkgs Release Notes</title>
<section><title>Release 0.14 (June 4, 2012)</title>
<para>In preparation for the switch from Subversion to Git, this
release is mainly the prevent the Nixpkgs version number from going
backwards. (This would happen because prerelease version numbers
produced for the Git repository are lower than those for the
Subversion repository.)</para>
<para>Since the last release, there have been thousands of changes and
new packages by numerous contributors. For details, see the commit
logs.</para>
</section>
<section><title>Release 0.13 (February 5, 2010)</title>
<para>As always, there are many changes. Some of the most important
updates are:
<itemizedlist>
<listitem><para>Glibc 2.9.</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>GCC 4.3.3.</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>Linux 2.6.32.</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>X.org 7.5.</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>KDE 4.3.4.</para></listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</para>
</section>
<section><title>Release 0.12 (April 24, 2009)</title>
<para>There are way too many additions to Nixpkgs since the last
release to list here: for example, the number of packages on Linux has
increased from 1002 to 2159. However, some specific improvements are
worth listing:
<itemizedlist>
<listitem><para>Nixpkgs now has a manual. In particular, it
describes the standard build environment in
detail.</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>Major new packages:
<itemizedlist>
<listitem><para>KDE 4.</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>TeXLive.</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>VirtualBox.</para></listitem>
</itemizedlist>
… and many others.
</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>Important updates:
<itemizedlist>
<listitem><para>Glibc 2.7.</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>GCC 4.2.4.</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>Linux 2.6.25 — 2.6.28.</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>Firefox 3.</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>X.org 7.3.</para></listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>Support for building derivations in a virtual
machine, including RPM and Debian builds in automatically generated
VM images. See
<filename>pkgs/build-support/vm/default.nix</filename> for
details.</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>Improved support for building Haskell
packages.</para></listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</para>
<para>The following people contributed to this release:
Andres Löh,
Arie Middelkoop,
Armijn Hemel,
Eelco Dolstra,
Lluís Batlle,
Ludovic Courtès,
Marc Weber,
Mart Kolthof,
Martin Bravenboer,
Michael Raskin,
Nicolas Pierron,
Peter Simons,
Pjotr Prins,
Rob Vermaas,
Sander van der Burg,
Tobias Hammerschmidt,
Valentin David,
Wouter den Breejen and
Yury G. Kudryashov.
In addition, several people contributed patches on the
<literal>nix-dev</literal> mailing list.</para>
</section>
<section><title>Release 0.11 (September 11, 2007)</title>
<para>This release has the following improvements:
<itemizedlist>
<listitem><para>The standard build environment
(<literal>stdenv</literal>) is now pure on the
<literal>x86_64-linux</literal> and <literal>powerpc-linux</literal>
platforms, just as on <literal>i686-linux</literal>. (Purity means
that building and using the standard environment has no dependencies
outside of the Nix store. For instance, it doesn’t require an
external C compiler such as <filename>/usr/bin/gcc</filename>.)
Also, the statically linked binaries used in the bootstrap process
are now automatically reproducible, making it easy to update the
bootstrap tools and to add support for other Linux platforms. See
<filename>pkgs/stdenv/linux/make-bootstrap-tools.nix</filename> for
details.</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>Hook variables in the generic builder are now
executed using the <function>eval</function> shell command. This
has a major advantage: you can write hooks directly in Nix
expressions. For instance, rather than writing a builder like this:
<programlisting>
source $stdenv/setup
postInstall=postInstall
postInstall() {
ln -sf gzip $out/bin/gunzip
ln -sf gzip $out/bin/zcat
}
genericBuild</programlisting>
(the <literal>gzip</literal> builder), you can just add this
attribute to the derivation:
<programlisting>
postInstall = "ln -sf gzip $out/bin/gunzip; ln -sf gzip $out/bin/zcat";</programlisting>
and so a separate build script becomes unnecessary. This should
allow us to get rid of most builders in Nixpkgs.</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>It is now possible to have the generic builder pass
arguments to <command>configure</command> and
<command>make</command> that contain whitespace. Previously, for
example, you could say in a builder,
<programlisting>
configureFlags="CFLAGS=-O0"</programlisting>
but not
<programlisting>
configureFlags="CFLAGS=-O0 -g"</programlisting>
since the <literal>-g</literal> would be interpreted as a separate
argument to <command>configure</command>. Now you can say
<programlisting>
configureFlagsArray=("CFLAGS=-O0 -g")</programlisting>
or similarly
<programlisting>
configureFlagsArray=("CFLAGS=-O0 -g" "LDFLAGS=-L/foo -L/bar")</programlisting>
which does the right thing. Idem for <literal>makeFlags</literal>,
<literal>installFlags</literal>, <literal>checkFlags</literal> and
<literal>distFlags</literal>.</para>
<para>Unfortunately you can't pass arrays to Bash through the
environment, so you can't put the array above in a Nix expression,
e.g.,
<programlisting>
configureFlagsArray = ["CFLAGS=-O0 -g"];</programlisting>
since it would just be flattened to a since string. However, you
<emphasis>can</emphasis> use the inline hooks described above:
<programlisting>
preConfigure = "configureFlagsArray=(\"CFLAGS=-O0 -g\")";</programlisting>
</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>The function <function>fetchurl</function> now has
support for two different kinds of mirroring of files. First, it
has support for <emphasis>content-addressable mirrors</emphasis>.
For example, given the <function>fetchurl</function> call
<programlisting>
fetchurl {
url = http://releases.mozilla.org/<replaceable>...</replaceable>/firefox-2.0.0.6-source.tar.bz2;
sha1 = "eb72f55e4a8bf08e8c6ef227c0ade3d068ba1082";
}</programlisting>
<function>fetchurl</function> will first try to download this file
from <link
xlink:href="http://tarballs.nixos.org/sha1/eb72f55e4a8bf08e8c6ef227c0ade3d068ba1082"/>.
If that file doesn’t exist, it will try the original URL. In
general, the “content-addressed” location is
<replaceable>mirror</replaceable><literal>/</literal><replaceable>hash-type</replaceable><literal>/</literal><replaceable>hash</replaceable>.
There is currently only one content-addressable mirror (<link
xlink:href="http://tarballs.nixos.org"/>), but more can be
specified in the <varname>hashedMirrors</varname> attribute in
<filename>pkgs/build-support/fetchurl/mirrors.nix</filename>, or by
setting the <envar>NIX_HASHED_MIRRORS</envar> environment variable
to a whitespace-separated list of URLs.</para>
<para>Second, <function>fetchurl</function> has support for
widely-mirrored distribution sites such as SourceForge or the Linux
kernel archives. Given a URL of the form
<literal>mirror://<replaceable>site</replaceable>/<replaceable>path</replaceable></literal>,
it will try to download <replaceable>path</replaceable> from a
configurable list of mirrors for <replaceable>site</replaceable>.
(This idea was borrowed from Gentoo Linux.) Example:
<programlisting>
fetchurl {
url =
|