Jan Tojnar
1c87deda62
Having multiple attributes point to the same derivation makes debugging harder because you often cannot just grep the canonical attribute name. It is even annoying when multiple aliases are chained. Having Hydra build aliases is recognized as redundant https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/commit/2d0a7c4eeecd22f26eb37f6077a0397c32250375 so let’s do the same with their evaluation. This commit will make Hydra ignore aliases when evaluating. A nice benefit of this is that it will allow us to warn users when an attribute is renamed, to assist them with early migration. Since tracing messages during evaluation are not allowed because of Hydra, we can currently only choose between having a silent alias and throwing. This was last attempted in 2018 but ended up being reverted because of widespread use of aliases that was not caught by CI: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/commit/8c025c67d5a151055ef63d2b0d94921604ff0f62 CI has since been improved: https://github.com/NixOS/ofborg/commit/cda5aa2ac77a70bb5660d8d5614a640aacbe7523
Nixpkgs is a collection of over 100,000 software packages that can be installed with the Nix package manager. It also implements NixOS, a purely-functional Linux distribution.
Manuals
- NixOS Manual - how to install, configure, and maintain a purely-functional Linux distribution
- Nixpkgs Manual - contributing to Nixpkgs and using programming-language-specific Nix expressions
- Nix Package Manager Manual - how to write Nix expressions (programs), and how to use Nix command line tools
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- Matrix Chat
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- Official wiki
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The sources of all official Nix-related projects are in the NixOS organization on GitHub. Here are some of the main ones:
- Nix - the purely functional package manager
- NixOps - the tool to remotely deploy NixOS machines
- nixos-hardware - NixOS profiles to optimize settings for different hardware
- Nix RFCs - the formal process for making substantial changes to the community
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- hydra - our continuous integration system
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Continuous Integration and Distribution
Nixpkgs and NixOS are built and tested by our continuous integration system, Hydra.
- Continuous package builds for unstable/master
- Continuous package builds for the NixOS 23.11 release
- Tests for unstable/master
- Tests for the NixOS 23.11 release
Artifacts successfully built with Hydra are published to cache at https://cache.nixos.org/. When successful build and test criteria are met, the Nixpkgs expressions are distributed via Nix channels.
Contributing
Nixpkgs is among the most active projects on GitHub. While thousands of open issues and pull requests might seem a lot at first, it helps consider it in the context of the scope of the project. Nixpkgs describes how to build tens of thousands of pieces of software and implements a Linux distribution. The GitHub Insights page gives a sense of the project activity.
Community contributions are always welcome through GitHub Issues and Pull Requests.
For more information about contributing to the project, please visit the contributing page.
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The infrastructure for NixOS and related projects is maintained by a nonprofit organization, the NixOS Foundation. To ensure the continuity and expansion of the NixOS infrastructure, we are looking for donations to our organization.
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License
Nixpkgs is licensed under the MIT License.
Note: MIT license does not apply to the packages built by Nixpkgs, merely to the files in this repository (the Nix expressions, build scripts, NixOS modules, etc.). It also might not apply to patches included in Nixpkgs, which may be derivative works of the packages to which they apply. The aforementioned artifacts are all covered by the licenses of the respective packages.