This Week in NixOS, first issue

Welcome to the first issue of This Week in NixOS. Nix is a purely functional package manager that aims at solving old problems with a new approach, and NixOS is the distribution based on Nix. This is an overview of what happened in the development of NixOS and in its community this week. If you want something mentioned in the next issue, send me an email !

This is the first issue, and I'm still trying to find the right formula for this weekly overview. Any comment welcome!

Nix itself

nix-store --read-log gets the ability to download the build logs from the build servers if they aren't available locally. For those, like me, who didn't know the --read-log option, it prints the build log of a given derivation. Since the builds are deterministic, the build logs are always the same whether the build occurred locally or on another machine.

Nixpkgs

Nixpkgs received its usual stream of package updates, the most noticeable probably being Gnome 3.12.

Updates also include but are not limited to the linux kernel, firefox, and a lot of haskell packages.

NixOS

• Many updates to nixos-install and to the install ISO (here is one of the 12 commits).
• Better support EC2 HVM instances.

Mailing list

Many questions and discussions this week, including discussion about a restructuring of the wiki.