Release 17.03 (“Gorilla”, 2017/03/31)
Highlights In addition to numerous new and upgraded packages, this release has the following 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 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. PHP now defaults to PHP 7.1
New Services The following new services were added since the last release: hardware/ckb.nix hardware/mcelog.nix hardware/usb-wwan.nix hardware/video/capture/mwprocapture.nix programs/adb.nix programs/chromium.nix programs/gphoto2.nix programs/java.nix programs/mtr.nix programs/oblogout.nix programs/vim.nix programs/wireshark.nix security/dhparams.nix services/audio/ympd.nix services/computing/boinc/client.nix services/continuous-integration/buildbot/master.nix services/continuous-integration/buildbot/worker.nix services/continuous-integration/gitlab-runner.nix services/databases/riak-cs.nix services/databases/stanchion.nix services/desktops/gnome3/gnome-terminal-server.nix services/editors/infinoted.nix services/hardware/illum.nix services/hardware/trezord.nix services/logging/journalbeat.nix services/mail/offlineimap.nix services/mail/postgrey.nix services/misc/couchpotato.nix services/misc/docker-registry.nix services/misc/errbot.nix services/misc/geoip-updater.nix services/misc/gogs.nix services/misc/leaps.nix services/misc/nix-optimise.nix services/misc/ssm-agent.nix services/misc/sssd.nix services/monitoring/arbtt.nix services/monitoring/netdata.nix services/monitoring/prometheus/default.nix services/monitoring/prometheus/alertmanager.nix services/monitoring/prometheus/blackbox-exporter.nix services/monitoring/prometheus/json-exporter.nix services/monitoring/prometheus/nginx-exporter.nix services/monitoring/prometheus/node-exporter.nix services/monitoring/prometheus/snmp-exporter.nix services/monitoring/prometheus/unifi-exporter.nix services/monitoring/prometheus/varnish-exporter.nix services/monitoring/sysstat.nix services/monitoring/telegraf.nix services/monitoring/vnstat.nix services/network-filesystems/cachefilesd.nix services/network-filesystems/glusterfs.nix services/network-filesystems/ipfs.nix services/networking/dante.nix services/networking/dnscrypt-wrapper.nix services/networking/fakeroute.nix services/networking/flannel.nix services/networking/htpdate.nix services/networking/miredo.nix services/networking/nftables.nix services/networking/powerdns.nix services/networking/pdns-recursor.nix services/networking/quagga.nix services/networking/redsocks.nix services/networking/wireguard.nix services/system/cgmanager.nix services/torrent/opentracker.nix services/web-apps/atlassian/confluence.nix services/web-apps/atlassian/crowd.nix services/web-apps/atlassian/jira.nix services/web-apps/frab.nix services/web-apps/nixbot.nix services/web-apps/selfoss.nix services/web-apps/quassel-webserver.nix services/x11/unclutter-xfixes.nix services/x11/urxvtd.nix system/boot/systemd-nspawn.nix virtualisation/ecs-agent.nix virtualisation/lxcfs.nix virtualisation/openstack/keystone.nix virtualisation/openstack/glance.nix
Backward Incompatibilities When upgrading from a previous release, please be aware of the following incompatible changes: Derivations have no .nativeDrv nor .crossDrv and are now cross by default, not native. stdenv.overrides is now expected to take self and super arguments. See lib.trivial.extends for what those parameters represent. ansible now defaults to ansible version 2 as version 1 has been removed due to a serious vulnerability unpatched by upstream. gnome alias has been removed along with gtk, gtkmm and several others. Now you need to use versioned attributes, like gnome3. The attribute name of the Radicale daemon has been changed from pythonPackages.radicale to radicale. The stripHash bash function in stdenv changed according to its documentation; it now outputs the stripped name to stdout instead of putting it in the variable strippedName. PHP now scans for extra configuration .ini files in /etc/php.d instead of /etc. This prevents accidentally loading non-PHP .ini files that may be in /etc. Two lone top-level dict dbs moved into dictdDBs. This affects: dictdWordnet which is now at dictdDBs.wordnet and dictdWiktionary which is now at dictdDBs.wiktionary Parsoid service now uses YAML configuration format. service.parsoid.interwikis is now called service.parsoid.wikis and is a list of either API URLs or attribute sets as specified in parsoid's documentation. Ntpd was replaced by systemd-timesyncd as the default service to synchronize system time with a remote NTP server. The old behavior can be restored by setting services.ntp.enable to true. Upstream time servers for all NTP implementations are now configured using networking.timeServers. service.nylon is now declared using named instances. As an example: services.nylon = { enable = true; acceptInterface = "br0"; bindInterface = "tun1"; port = 5912; }; should be replaced with: services.nylon.myvpn = { enable = true; acceptInterface = "br0"; bindInterface = "tun1"; port = 5912; }; this enables you to declare a SOCKS proxy for each uplink. overridePackages function no longer exists. It is replaced by overlays. For example, the following code: let pkgs = import <nixpkgs> {}; in pkgs.overridePackages (self: super: ...) should be replaced by: let pkgs = import <nixpkgs> {}; in import pkgs.path { overlays = [(self: super: ...)]; } Autoloading connection tracking helpers is now disabled by default. This default was also changed in the Linux kernel and is considered insecure if not configured properly in your firewall. If you need connection tracking helpers (i.e. for active FTP) please enable networking.firewall.autoLoadConntrackHelpers and tune networking.firewall.connectionTrackingModules to suit your needs. local_recipient_maps is not set to empty value by Postfix service. It's an insecure default as stated by Postfix documentation. Those who want to retain this setting need to set it via services.postfix.extraConfig. Iputils no longer provide ping6 and traceroute6. The functionality of these tools has been integrated into ping and traceroute respectively. To enforce an address family the new flags -4 and -6 have been added. One notable incompatibility is that specifying an interface (for link-local IPv6 for instance) is no longer done with the -I flag, but by encoding the interface into the address (ping fe80::1%eth0). The socket handling of the services.rmilter module has been fixed and refactored. As rmilter doesn't support binding to more than one socket, the options bindUnixSockets and bindInetSockets have been replaced by services.rmilter.bindSocket.*. The default is still a unix socket in /run/rmilter/rmilter.sock. Refer to the options documentation for more information. The fetch* functions no longer support md5, please use sha256 instead. The dnscrypt-proxy module interface has been streamlined around the option. Where possible, legacy option declarations are mapped to but will emit warnings. The has been outright removed: to use an unlisted resolver, use the option. torbrowser now stores local state under ~/.local/share/tor-browser by default. Any browser profile data from the old location, ~/.torbrowser4, must be migrated manually. The ihaskell, monetdb, offlineimap and sitecopy services have been removed.
Other Notable Changes Module type system have a new extensible option types feature that allow to extend certain types, such as enum, through multiple option declarations of the same option across multiple modules. jre now defaults to GTK UI by default. This improves visual consistency and makes Java follow system font style, improving the situation on HighDPI displays. This has a cost of increased closure size; for server and other headless workloads it's recommended to use jre_headless. Python 2.6 interpreter and package set have been removed. The Python 2.7 interpreter does not use modules anymore. Instead, all CPython interpreters now include the whole standard library except for `tkinter`, which is available in the Python package set. Python 2.7, 3.5 and 3.6 are now built deterministically and 3.4 mostly. Minor modifications had to be made to the interpreters in order to generate deterministic bytecode. This has security implications and is relevant for those using Python in a nix-shell. See the Nixpkgs manual for details. The Python package sets now use a fixed-point combinator and the sets are available as attributes of the interpreters. The Python function buildPythonPackage has been improved and can be used to build from Setuptools source, Flit source, and precompiled Wheels. When adding new or updating current Python libraries, the expressions should be put in separate files in pkgs/development/python-modules and called from python-packages.nix. The dnscrypt-proxy service supports synchronizing the list of public resolvers without working DNS resolution. This fixes issues caused by the resolver list becoming outdated. It also improves the viability of DNSCrypt only configurations. Containers using bridged networking no longer lose their connection after changes to the host networking. ZFS supports pool auto scrubbing. The bind DNS utilities (e.g. dig) have been split into their own output and are now also available in pkgs.dnsutils and it is no longer necessary to pull in all of bind to use them. Per-user configuration was moved from ~/.nixpkgs to ~/.config/nixpkgs. The former is still valid for config.nix for backwards compatibility.