Nixpkgs Release NotesRelease 0.10 (October 11, 2006)This release of Nixpkgs requires Nix
0.10.This release has the following improvements:pkgs/system/all-packages-generic.nix
is gone, we now just have
pkgs/top-level/all-packages.nix that contains
all available packages. This should cause much less confusion with
users. all-packages.nix is a function that by
default returns packages for the current platform, but you can
override this by specifying a different system
argument.TODO: user configurability. Configuration file in
~/.nixpkgs/config.nix.Support for new platforms:
i686-cygwin, i.e., Windows
(using Cygwin).
The standard environment on i686-cygwin by
default builds binaries for the Cygwin environment (i.e., it
uses Cygwin tools and produces executables that use the Cygwin
library). However, there is also a standard environment that
produces binaries that use MinGW. You can use it
by calling all-package.nix with the
stdenvType argument set to
"i686-mingw".i686-darwin, i.e., Mac OS X
on Intel CPUs.powerpc-linux.x86_64-linux, i.e., Linux on
64-bit AMD/Intel CPUs. Unlike i686-linux,
this platform doesn’t have a pure stdenv
yet.The default compiler is now GCC 4.1.1.X11 updated to X.org’s X11R7.1.Notable new packages:
Opera.Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition and the Windows
SDK.
In total there are now around 809 packages in Nixpkgs.It is now much easier to
override the default C compiler and other tools in
stdenv for specific packages.
all-packages.nix provides two utility
functions for this purpose: overrideGCC and
overrideInStdenv. Both take a
stdenv and return an augmented
stdenv; the formed changes the C compiler, and
the latter adds additional packages to the front of
stdenv’s initial PATH, allowing
tools to be overriden.For instance, the package strategoxt
doesn’t build with the GNU Make in stdenv
(version 3.81), so we call it with an augmented
stdenv that uses GNU Make 3.80:
strategoxt = (import ../development/compilers/strategoxt) {
inherit fetchurl pkgconfig sdf aterm;
stdenv = overrideInStdenv stdenv [gnumake380];
};
Likewise, there are many packages that don’t compile with the
default GCC (4.1.1), but that’s easily fixed:
exult = import ../games/exult {
inherit fetchurl SDL SDL_mixer zlib libpng unzip;
stdenv = overrideGCC stdenv gcc34;
};The following people contributed to this release:
Andres Löh,
Armijn Hemel,
Christof Douma,
Eelco Dolstra,
Eelco Visser,
Mart Kolthof,
Martin Bravenboer,
Merijn de Jonge,
Rob Vermaas and
Roy van den Broek.
Release 0.9 (January 31, 2006)There have been zillions of changes since the last release of
Nixpkgs. Many packages have been added or updated. The following are
some of the more notable changes:Distribution files have been moved to .The C library on Linux, Glibc, has been updated to
version 2.3.6.The default compiler is now GCC 3.4.5. GCC 4.0.2 is
also available.The old, unofficial Xlibs has been replaced by the
official modularised X11 distribution from X.org, i.e., X11R7.0.
X11R7.0 consists of 287 (!) packages, all of which are in Nixpkgs
though not all have been tested. It is now possible to build a
working X server (previously we only had X client libraries). We
use a fully Nixified X server on NixOS.The Sun JDK 5 has been purified, i.e., it doesn’t
require any non-Nix components such as
/lib/ld-linux.so.2. This means that Java
applications such as Eclipse and Azureus can run on
NixOS.Hardware-accelerated OpenGL support, used by games
like Quake 3 (which is now built from source).Improved support for FreeBSD on
x86.Improved Haskell support; e.g., the GHC build is now
pure.Some support for cross-compilation: cross-compiling
builds of GCC and Binutils, and cross-compiled builds of the C
library uClibc.Notable new packages:
teTeX, including support for building LaTeX
documents using Nix (with automatic dependency
determination).Ruby.System-level packages to support NixOS,
e.g. Grub, GNU parted and so
on.ecj, the Eclipse Compiler for
Java, so we finally have a freely distributable compiler that
supports Java 5.0.php.The GIMP.Inkscape.GAIM.kdelibs. This allows us to
add KDE-based packages (such as
kcachegrind).The following people contributed to this release:
Andres Löh,
Armijn Hemel,
Bogdan Dumitriu,
Christof Douma,
Eelco Dolstra,
Eelco Visser,
Mart Kolthof,
Martin Bravenboer,
Rob Vermaas and
Roy van den Broek.
Release 0.8 (April 11, 2005)This release is mostly to remain synchronised with the changed
hashing scheme in Nix 0.8.Notable updates:
Adobe Reader 7.0Various security updates (zlib 1.2.2, etc.)Release 0.7 (March 14, 2005)The bootstrap process for the standard build
environment on Linux (stdenv-linux) has been improved. It is no
longer dependent in its initial bootstrap stages on the system
Glibc, GCC, and other tools. Rather, Nixpkgs contains a statically
linked bash and curl, and uses that to download other statically
linked tools. These are then used to build a Glibc and dynamically
linked versions of all other tools.This change also makes the bootstrap process faster. For
instance, GCC is built only once instead of three times.(Contributed by Armijn Hemel.)Tarballs used by Nixpkgs are now obtained from the same server
that hosts Nixpkgs (). This reduces the
risk of packages being unbuildable due to moved or deleted files on
various servers.There now is a generic mechanism for building Perl modules.
See the various Perl modules defined in
pkgs/system/all-packages-generic.nix.Notable new packages:
Qt 3MySQLMythTVMonoMonoDevelop (alpha)XineNotable updates:
GCC 3.4.3Glibc 2.3.4GTK 2.6