lix/doc/manual/src/release-notes/rl-0.6.md

Release 0.6 (2004-11-14)

• Rewrite of the normalisation engine.

  • Multiple builds can now be performed in parallel (option -j).

  • Distributed builds. Nix can now call a shell script to forward builds to Nix installations on remote machines, which may or may not be of the same platform type.

  • Option --fallback allows recovery from broken substitutes.

  • Option --keep-going causes building of other (unaffected) derivations to continue if one failed.

• Improvements to the garbage collector (i.e., it should actually work now).

• Setuid Nix installations allow a Nix store to be shared among multiple users.

• Substitute registration is much faster now.

• A utility nix-build to build a Nix expression and create a symlink to the result int the current directory; useful for testing Nix derivations.

• Manual updates.

• nix-env changes:

  • Derivations for other platforms are filtered out (which can be overridden using --system-filter).

  • --install by default now uninstall previous derivations with the same name.

  • --upgrade allows upgrading to a specific version.

  • New operation --delete-generations to remove profile generations (necessary for effective garbage collection).

  • Nicer output (sorted, columnised).

• More sensible verbosity levels all around (builder output is now shown always, unless -Q is given).

• Nix expression language changes:

  • New language construct: with E1; E2 brings all attributes defined in the attribute set E1 in scope in E2.

  • Added a map function.

  • Various new operators (e.g., string concatenation).

• Expression evaluation is much faster.

• An Emacs mode for editing Nix expressions (with syntax highlighting and indentation) has been added.

• Many bug fixes.