"nix-channel --add" now accepts a second argument: the channel name.
This allows channels to have a nicer name than (say) nixpkgs_unstable.
If no name is given, it defaults to the last component of the URL
(with "-unstable" or "-stable" removed).
Also, channels are now stored in a profile
(/nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/$USER/channels). One advantage of
this is that it allows rollbacks (e.g. if "nix-channel --update" gives
an undesirable update).
Setting the UNAME26 personality causes "uname" to return "2.6.x",
regardless of the kernel version. This improves determinism in
a few misbehaved packages.
Sometimes when doing "nix-build --run-env" you don't want all
dependencies to be built. For instance, if we want to do "--run-env"
on the "build" attribute in Hydra's release.nix (to get Hydra's build
environment), we don't want its "tarball" dependency to be built. So
we can do:
$ nix-build --run-env release.nix -A build --exclude 'hydra-tarball'
This will skip the dependency whose name matches the "hydra-tarball"
regular expression. The "--exclude" option can be repeated any number
of times.
Make the garbage collector more concurrent by deleting valid paths
outside the region where we're holding the global GC lock. This
should greatly reduce the time during which new builds are blocked,
since the deletion accounts for the vast majority of the time spent in
the GC.
To ensure that this is safe, the valid paths are invalidated and
renamed to some arbitrary path while we're holding the lock. This
ensures that we when we finally delete the path, it's not a (newly)
valid or locked path.
This command builds or fetches all dependencies of the given
derivation, then starts a shell with the environment variables from
the derivation. This shell also sources $stdenv/setup to initialise
the environment further.
The current directory is not changed. Thus this is a convenient way
to reproduce a build environment in an existing working tree.
Existing environment variables are left untouched (unless the
derivation overrides them). As a special hack, the original value of
$PATH is appended to the $PATH produced by $stdenv/setup.
Example session:
$ nix-build --run-env '<nixpkgs>' -A xterm
(the dependencies of xterm are built/fetched...)
$ tar xf $src
$ ./configure
$ make
$ emacs
(... hack source ...)
$ make
$ ./xterm
Ensuring that the tests work from the build tree requires a growing
number of nasty hacks. The tests also don't verify that the installed
Nix actually works. Thus, the tests now require "make install" to
have been run.
Nix now requires SQLite and bzip2 to be pre-installed. SQLite is
detected using pkg-config. We required DBD::SQLite anyway, so
depending on SQLite is not a big problem.
The --with-bzip2, --with-openssl and --with-sqlite flags are gone.
By moving the destructor object to libstore.so, it's also run when
download-using-manifests and nix-prefetch-url exit. This prevents
them from cluttering /nix/var/nix/temproots with stale files.
