Welcome to a new 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!
Nixpkgs, the package compilation
As usually, a ton of changes happened in Nixpkgs. I'll cite the new expression firefox-bin for the binary distribution of Firefox, which fixed a strange session problem I had with the source version of Firefox 30.
The more time I spend trying to follow the changes in Nixpkgs, the more I realize how much we need tools to seen what's happening in NixOS. I hope I can discuss this with the fellow NixOS users I meet at the EuroPython next week.
Alexander Kjeldaas has worked on binary determinism in Nixpkgs. The goal of binary determinism is that the output of package build is always the same, bit for bit. This is not the case currently: there are many things that can result in a different binary. For example, many programs include the build time in the resulting binary. One of main advantage is security: since anybody can get the exact same binary package, anybody can verify that the NixOS binary cache serves the right binaries, without any backdoor added. Thanks to Austin Seipp for explaining this to me. You can check his explaination for more details.
A staging branch has been added to the git repository. Changes that cause massive rebuilds/redownloads are to be merge into staging, and staging will be merge into master every few weeks. That way, Hydra can start all the rebuilds while still building the master channel, which should avoid the channel freezes caused by Hydra rebuilding the world before updating the channel.
The community
On twitter, @NixOsTips tweets useful tips about using Nix and NixOS usage, which can be difficult to discover in the docs or the wiki. They also tweet articles about NixOS, and end up being one of the sources of this newsletter.
On the mailing list, a discussion about the rebuild impact factor and how to compute it, a thread about the use of ruby gems in NixOS (it's not pretty for now, and needs some love from someone how knows ruby packaging well enough), and a nice trick to avoid needless copying when using nix-shell.
NixOS is recieving a lot of attention recently, especially from Haskell developpers: a couple of people give feedback on their experience with Nix for development, and it's quite positive, with some useful criticism.