Welcome to the second 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. A lot of things happen in a lot of places and I might miss some, so if you want to make sure that something is mentionned in the next issue, send me an email!
Nix itself
scopedImport was introduced in Nix. It enables the definition of package expressions without having to list the dependencies again as function arguments (which is the case for every packages as of now), making the writing of package expressions (even) simpler. It isn't used in nixpkgs yet, but I guess we will see a big commit removing all argument definitions at some point.
Nixpkgs
As usual, a lot of packages updates, though I don't think I have seen anything huge. I plan on writing some tools to generate an exhaustive list of updates for this section (and at some point, for your nixos-rebuild and nix-env -u).
Darwin support has been greatly improved, with several major bug fixes.
A lot of progress in the new pypi2nix. I don't think we'll have to wait too long for this new, shiny way to generate nix expressions from python packages.
Community
NixOS now has a new website. While the old website presented all Nix related projects (nix, nixos, hydra, disnix, etc) on an equal footing, the new website focuses on NixOS to give an immediate overview of its advantages and the dynamism of its community. The new website a lot of feedback and constructive criticism on the mailing list.
Joachim Schiele presented the first preview of nix-build-view, a graphical frontend for nix-build, to visualize parallel execution of downloads and builds. This first preview does not actually display nix build execution: it aims at generating discussion about what a good tool should be before actually find how to integrate with nix. The goal is to create NixOS tools that have the same level of quality as Gentoo tools. This is something I have in mind for some time, so I'll keep a close eye on the initiative.