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.