Release 15.09 (“Dingo”, 2015/09/30)
In addition to numerous new and upgraded packages, this release has the
following highlights:
The Haskell packages
infrastructure has been re-designed from the ground up ("Haskell
NG"). NixOS now distributes the latest version of every single package
registered on
Hackage -- well
in excess of 8,000 Haskell packages. Detailed instructions on how to use
that infrastructure can be found in the
User's
Guide to the Haskell Infrastructure. Users migrating from an earlier
release may find helpful information below, in the list of
backwards-incompatible changes. Furthermore, we distribute 51(!) additional
Haskell package sets that provide every single
LTS Haskell release
since version 0.0 as well as the most recent
Stackage Nightly
snapshot. The announcement
"Full
Stackage Support in Nixpkgs" gives additional details.
Nix has been updated to version 1.10, which among other improvements
enables cryptographic signatures on binary caches for improved security.
You can now keep your NixOS system up to date automatically by setting
system.autoUpgrade.enable = true;
This will cause the system to periodically check for updates in your
current channel and run nixos-rebuild.
This release is based on Glibc 2.21, GCC 4.9 and Linux 3.18.
GNOME has been upgraded to 3.16.
Xfce has been upgraded to 4.12.
KDE 5 has been upgraded to KDE Frameworks 5.10, Plasma 5.3.2 and
Applications 15.04.3. KDE 4 has been updated to kdelibs-4.14.10.
E19 has been upgraded to 0.16.8.15.
The following new services were added since the last release:
services/mail/exim.nixservices/misc/apache-kafka.nixservices/misc/canto-daemon.nixservices/misc/confd.nixservices/misc/devmon.nixservices/misc/gitit.nixservices/misc/ihaskell.nixservices/misc/mbpfan.nixservices/misc/mediatomb.nixservices/misc/mwlib.nixservices/misc/parsoid.nixservices/misc/plex.nixservices/misc/ripple-rest.nixservices/misc/ripple-data-api.nixservices/misc/subsonic.nixservices/misc/sundtek.nixservices/monitoring/cadvisor.nixservices/monitoring/das_watchdog.nixservices/monitoring/grafana.nixservices/monitoring/riemann-tools.nixservices/monitoring/teamviewer.nixservices/network-filesystems/u9fs.nixservices/networking/aiccu.nixservices/networking/asterisk.nixservices/networking/bird.nixservices/networking/charybdis.nixservices/networking/docker-registry-server.nixservices/networking/fan.nixservices/networking/firefox/sync-server.nixservices/networking/gateone.nixservices/networking/heyefi.nixservices/networking/i2p.nixservices/networking/lambdabot.nixservices/networking/mstpd.nixservices/networking/nix-serve.nixservices/networking/nylon.nixservices/networking/racoon.nixservices/networking/skydns.nixservices/networking/shout.nixservices/networking/softether.nixservices/networking/sslh.nixservices/networking/tinc.nixservices/networking/tlsdated.nixservices/networking/tox-bootstrapd.nixservices/networking/tvheadend.nixservices/networking/zerotierone.nixservices/scheduling/marathon.nixservices/security/fprintd.nixservices/security/hologram.nixservices/security/munge.nixservices/system/cloud-init.nixservices/web-servers/shellinabox.nixservices/web-servers/uwsgi.nixservices/x11/unclutter.nixservices/x11/display-managers/sddm.nixsystem/boot/coredump.nixsystem/boot/loader/loader.nixsystem/boot/loader/generic-extlinux-compatiblesystem/boot/networkd.nixsystem/boot/resolved.nixsystem/boot/timesyncd.nixtasks/filesystems/exfat.nixtasks/filesystems/ntfs.nixtasks/filesystems/vboxsf.nixvirtualisation/virtualbox-host.nixvirtualisation/vmware-guest.nixvirtualisation/xen-dom0.nix
When upgrading from a previous release, please be aware of the following
incompatible changes:
sshd no longer supports DSA and ECDSA host keys by
default. If you have existing systems with such host keys and want to
continue to use them, please set
system.stateVersion = "14.12";
The new option ensures that certain
configuration changes that could break existing systems (such as the
sshd host key setting) will maintain compatibility with
the specified NixOS release. NixOps sets the state version of existing
deployments automatically.
cron is no longer enabled by default, unless you have a
non-empty . To force
cron to be enabled, set .
Nix now requires binary caches to be cryptographically signed. If you have
unsigned binary caches that you want to continue to use, you should set
.
Steam now doesn't need root rights to work. Instead of using
*-steam-chrootenv, you should now just run
steam. steamChrootEnv package was
renamed to steam, and old steam
package -- to steamOriginal.
CMPlayer has been renamed to bomi upstream. Package
cmplayer was accordingly renamed to
bomi
Atom Shell has been renamed to Electron upstream. Package
atom-shell was accordingly renamed to
electron
Elm is not released on Hackage anymore. You should now use
elmPackages.elm which contains the latest Elm platform.
The CUPS printing service has been updated to version
2.0.2. Furthermore its systemd service has been renamed
to cups.service.
Local printers are no longer shared or advertised by default. This
behavior can be changed by enabling
or
respectively.
The VirtualBox host and guest options have been named more consistently.
They can now found in
instead of and
instead of
.
Also, there now is support for the vboxsf file system
using the configuration attribute. An example
of how this can be used in a configuration:
fileSystems."/shiny" = {
device = "myshinysharedfolder";
fsType = "vboxsf";
};
"nix-env -qa" no longer discovers Haskell
packages by name. The only packages visible in the global scope are
ghc, cabal-install, and
stack, but all other packages are hidden. The reason
for this inconvenience is the sheer size of the Haskell package set.
Name-based lookups are expensive, and most nix-env -qa
operations would become much slower if we'd add the entire Hackage
database into the top level attribute set. Instead, the list of Haskell
packages can be displayed by running:
nix-env -f "<nixpkgs>" -qaP -A haskellPackages
Executable programs written in Haskell can be installed with:
nix-env -f "<nixpkgs>" -iA haskellPackages.pandoc
Installing Haskell libraries this way, however, is no
longer supported. See the next item for more details.
Previous versions of NixOS came with a feature called
ghc-wrapper, a small script that allowed GHC to
transparently pick up on libraries installed in the user's profile. This
feature has been deprecated; ghc-wrapper was removed
from the distribution. The proper way to register Haskell libraries with
the compiler now is the haskellPackages.ghcWithPackages
function. The
User's
Guide to the Haskell Infrastructure provides more information about
this subject.
All Haskell builds that have been generated with version 1.x of the
cabal2nix utility are now invalid and need to be
re-generated with a current version of cabal2nix to
function. The most recent version of this tool can be installed by running
nix-env -i cabal2nix.
The haskellPackages set in Nixpkgs used to have a
function attribute called extension that users could
override in their ~/.nixpkgs/config.nix files to
configure additional attributes, etc. That function still exists, but it's
now called overrides.
The OpenBLAS library has been updated to version
0.2.14. Support for the
x86_64-darwin platform was added. Dynamic architecture
detection was enabled; OpenBLAS now selects microarchitecture-optimized
routines at runtime, so optimal performance is achieved without the need
to rebuild OpenBLAS locally. OpenBLAS has replaced ATLAS in most packages
which use an optimized BLAS or LAPACK implementation.
The phpfpm is now using the default PHP version
(pkgs.php) instead of PHP 5.4
(pkgs.php54).
The locate service no longer indexes the Nix store by
default, preventing packages with potentially numerous versions from
cluttering the output. Indexing the store can be activated by setting
.
The Nix expression search path (NIX_PATH) no longer
contains /etc/nixos/nixpkgs by default. You can
override NIX_PATH by setting .
Python 2.6 has been marked as broken (as it no longer receives security
updates from upstream).
Any use of module arguments such as pkgs to access
library functions, or to define imports attributes will
now lead to an infinite loop at the time of the evaluation.
In case of an infinite loop, use the --show-trace
command line argument and read the line just above the error message.
$ nixos-rebuild build --show-trace
…
while evaluating the module argument `pkgs' in "/etc/nixos/my-module.nix":
infinite recursion encountered
Any use of pkgs.lib, should be replaced by
lib, after adding it as argument of the module. The
following module
{ config, pkgs, ... }:
with pkgs.lib;
{
options = {
foo = mkOption { … };
};
config = mkIf config.foo { … };
}
should be modified to look like:
{ config, pkgs, lib, ... }:
with lib;
{
options = {
foo = mkOption { option declaration };
};
config = mkIf config.foo { option definition };
}
When pkgs is used to download other projects to import
their modules, and only in such cases, it should be replaced by
(import <nixpkgs> {}). The following module
{ config, pkgs, ... }:
let
myProject = pkgs.fetchurl {
src = url;
sha256 = hash;
};
in
{
imports = [ "${myProject}/module.nix" ];
}
should be modified to look like:
{ config, pkgs, ... }:
let
myProject = (import <nixpkgs> {}).fetchurl {
src = url;
sha256 = hash;
};
in
{
imports = [ "${myProject}/module.nix" ];
}
Other notable improvements:
The nixos and nixpkgs channels were unified, so one
can use nix-env -iA nixos.bash
instead of nix-env -iA nixos.pkgs.bash. See
the
commit for details.
Users running an SSH server who worry about the quality of their
/etc/ssh/moduli file with respect to the
vulnerabilities
discovered in the Diffie-Hellman key exchange can now replace
OpenSSH's default version with one they generated themselves using the new
option.
A newly packaged TeX Live 2015 is provided in
pkgs.texlive, split into 6500 nix packages. For basic
user documentation see
the
source. Beware of
an
issue when installing a too large package set. The plan is to
deprecate and maybe delete the original TeX packages until the next
release.
on all Python interpreters is now available
for nix-shell interoperability.