Hey everyone, we are Martin Weinelt and Janne Heß, the release managers for this stable release and we are very proud to announce the public availability of NixOS 22.11 “Raccoon”.
This release will receive bugfixes and security updates for seven months (up until 2023-06-30).
The 22.11 release was made possible due to the efforts of 1652 contributors, who authored 30371 commits since the previous release. Our thanks go the contributors who also take care of the continued stability and security of our stable distribution.
NixOS is already known as the most up to date distribution while also being the distribution with the most packages. This release saw 16678 new packages and 14680 updated packages in nixpkgs. We also removed 2812 packages in an effort to keep the package set maintainable and secure. In addition to packages the NixOS distribution also features modules and tests that make it what it is. This release brought 91 new modules and removed 20. In that process we added 1322 options and removed 487.
Password hashing migration
During the NixOS 22.11 lifecycle old password hashes may need to be updated, because we plan to disable weak password hashes in NixOS 23.05. We consider password hashing methods weak, if the libxcrypt project did not flag them strong. If your system is configured with weak hashes a script will emit a warning during activation. We expect most users accounts to be set up with sha512crypt (hash prefixed with $6$) which we will continue to support. Interactively configured passwords can be updated using passwd, new password hashes can be generated through mkpasswd.
aarch64-linux channel merge
The separate aarch64-linux specific channels have been discontinued. Their jobs have been merged into the generic nixos-22.11 and nixos-22.11-small channels and will thereby receive updates at the same time as their x86_64-linux counterparts.
Special Thanks
We want to personally thank Winter and Jörg Thalheim for editorializing the release notes, Vladimír Čunát for his tireless effort in managing jobsets and staging cycles, and Graham Christensen for dutifully tending to our build infrastructure.
Reflections and Closing
I’m thankful for being given the chance to guide the release process. It is an exciting experience and seeing the tremendous collaborative effort the community invests to make the release a success is inspiring. While previous release managers made great strides to document the process there are lots of steps that could be benefit from better documentation and more tooling. It is our hope that future release managers and the community will iterate further on this.