Hey everyone, I’m Jonathan Ringer, the release manager for 21.05. As promised, the latest stable release is here: NixOS 21.05 “Okapi”.
The 21.05 release was possible due to the efforts of 1745 contributors in 33474 commits. We would especially like to thank our top 10 contributors: Fabian Affolter, Frederik Rietdijk, Sandro Jäckel, Tim Steinbach, Jonathan Ringer, Martin Weinelt, Mario Rodas, Robert Schütz, Jan Tojnar, Sterni.
NixOS is already known as the most up to date distribution and is in the top three by total number of packages.
This didn’t stop us. In the last six months:
- 12985 packages were added
- 14109 packages were removed
- 16768 packages were updated
Likewise, our NixOS module system got bigger and better:
- 1527 options were added
- 290 options removed
- 400 options were updated
Stabilization Contributors
Stabilization of the NixOS happens a month before the planned release. The goal is to have as little as possible continuous integration (Hydra) jobs failing before the release is cut.
Individuals who contributed to stabilizing this release: Fabian Affolter, Sterni, Stéphan Kochen, Robert Schütz, Martin Weinelt, Jonathan Ringer, Alyssa Ross, Andrew Childs, Thomas Tuegel, Malte Brandy, and 431 others!
Special Thanks
I would like to give a special thanks to Jan Tojnar and others for the Gnome 40 stabilization effort. Another special thanks should be given to Thomas Tuegel and many others for bringing Plasma 5.21 to NixOS.
Reflections and Closing
I think the RFC80 and RFC85 changes to the release process were successful in limiting risk and making the release more deterministic. This is the first release since 17.03 to have released in the intended month, although the rendered manual and official announcement were delayed a day. In the future, I hope to make the release as “boring” as possible, and have it be a time to improve the quality of nixpkgs’ unstable and stable channels.