Another two weeks have passed and it is time for our summary.

A new section Questions was added to the newsletter. The intention for this new section is that it is going to expose some of the questions that happen in the past. We hope that none of the questions will be left unanswered.

Sometimes we forget just how awesome Nix / NixOS is and we take its capabilities for granted. It is important that we remind ourself from time to time why are we using it, via reddit - In Love:

Just thought I’d share a compliment, switched from Arch, this thing is beautiful. Installing low level packages, configuration files, it all works so well.

Only issues are documentation (which I can see is being worked on and solved, albeit with limited manpower), and that some packages don’t seem to work well with the package manager, but that’s fixable over time.

But it’s great for what it is, easy to get running, but still fully customization.

News

• Important date: 27. Feb 2017 a branch-off for next NixOS release, 17.03 (Gorilla), is going to happen

  This means you have few more days to land your change to nixpkgs master if you want them to be a part of Gorilla.

  You can also follow the 17.03 milestone.

• Assistance Required for Vulnerability Roundups

  Since last newsletter 2 Vulnerability Roundup happen: 21, 22.

  Graham Christensen is doing an amazing work coordinating the effort of a security team and also doing a big chunk of the work. Recently he asked for help and let us make sure he gets some helping hand, or two, three, …

  We can all recognize that The work the security team is doing is of a great importance, since that makes it possible for the rest community to use NixOS in more production environments.

• At FOSDEM a very [spontaneous NixOS discussion panel happen]{.title-ref}. As a follow-up @zimbatm created an initial proposal for RFC.

  Having a more formal proposal how we work together and how bigger changes are discussed is a step towards mature Linux distribution. Having NixOS already reached this state is an impressive achievement.

• xorg-server major update

• KDE4 removed in master

• Haskell: master has switched to LTS 8.x with GHC 8.0.2

• Python 3 as default (discussion).

• Nixpkgs: Adding setcap-wrapper functionality

• Nix: Add support for s3:// URIs

• Feedback requested: Feedback on workshop material

• Feedback requested: Better firewalling in NixOS

• Feedback requested: “Monitoring” NixOS?

• Release: vagrant-nixos-plugin released v0.2.1, now with —show-trace support.

  Add basic nix configuration provisioning for NixOS guests in Vagrant.

• Release: docker-nix-builder beta.

  Did you ever have to battle with a user that only wants to have Docker installed on his system? Or a user that is developing on macOS and has broken nix packages?

  docker-nix-builder is a tool to help smooth the transition. Instead of using nix to build the project, use Docker to run nix to build the project. At the end the users gets a new Docker container that only (mostly) contains the build result.

• Release: Bundle Nix derivations to run anywhere, nix-bundle

  nix-bundle is a way to package Nix attributes into single-file executables. Benefits: Single-file output, Can be run by non-root users, No runtime, Distro agnostic, Completely portable, No installation

Reading

• A truly reproducible scientific paper? by Bruno Vieira.
• NixOS Linux vs CoreOS Container Linux by Daniel van Dorp.

Presentations

• Last month’s talk on Nix and NixOS from the Louisville Haskell Meetup.
• Deploying NPM packages with the Nix package manager by Sander van der Burg.
• NixOS - Les infrastructures immuables et la configuration déclarative by David Sferruzza

Meetups

• Feb 24—26, 2017, HackIllinois, University of Illinois, USA

  For any university students in the US, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is holding a hackathon oriented towards getting people into open source development, and I’m going to be mentoring people for Nix/NixOS/Haskell development. Be sure to put “NixOS” or “Haskell” into your application somewhere.

• Feb 25, 2017, Amsterdam Nix Meetup at Container Solutions, Amsterdam, Netherlands

• Mar 22, 2017, Munich NixOS Meetup at OpenLab Augsburg, Augsburg, Germany

  John Darrington will give a talk about guix and guixSD, a package manager and a Linux distribution which are based on similar concepts as nix/NixOS.

  The talk will be in English.

Meetups that just happened

• Feb 18, 2017, Berlin NixOS Meetup at Schnee von morgen, Berlin, Germany
• Feb 09, 2017, NixOS: Functional Packaging For The Win by Tobias Pflug at Wasserturm Stromeyersdorf, Konstanz, Germany

Questions

• Problem: fail to build ghc in nix
• Best way to handle .desktop files in user installed packages
• Awesomewm and NixOS
• Help - Global Cursor Config XMonad
• Help with patch for screen locking
• How to nix-build again a built store path?
• NixOS, Haskell, opengl : problems with building and running openGL programs
• lib.mapAttrsToList and infinite recursion
• How to use buildMaven

Jobs

Looking for some Nix developers? Let us help you.

• Smarkets, London, United Kingdom

  We are looking for Infra team lead and Infra engineer.

  The jobs are not a Nix jobs per se since we are not using Nix at the moment. However, internally few of us are interested in trying it for e.g. building AMIs or provisioning docker containers with (mostly) python software. We think some strong candidate with experience of using Nix in production would have a good chance of seeing some adoption here.

Editor’s corner

As you also probably noticed, this newsletter is coming out 2 days late. I am trying to get it out in time, but life happens also. If you would like to help release weekly newsletter please contact me.