The 17.03 “Gorilla” release has been tagged! There are too many good things in this release to pick favourites. I refer you to the release notes instead.

Some fun stats:

• ~ 900 new packages since 16.09
• ~ 80 new contributors (very inexact science this)
• ~ 60 new services

News

• Did I mention the release? Robin has been doing a fantastic job, thank him when you meet him! He’s also had a lot of help of course, so thanks to all those people as well. It’s a pretty long list and you can get it with “git shortlog 8def08..17.03”.
• Extra capacity is coming for Hydra OSX builds, thanks to all the great people that have donated to NixOS Foundation.
• We now have an official RFC process. Thanks to zimbatm for writing our first ever RFC. We already have three pull requests so go forth and comment.
• remove-perl branch just got merged to master. Time to celebrate.
• Sander released Disnix 0.7
• Théophane has started his work on typing Nix. You can follow along here. He’s also answering some questions in this mailing list thread.

Reading

• One long-standing issue in Nix has been the storage of secrets. Right now many of our services store their secrets in /nix where they are world readable. This means you can’t have root-only secrets, multi-user systems are problematic, and if one of your services is compromised it can be used to steal all your other secrets. Eelco created an RFC for encrypting secrets at rest.
• Monte is a dynamic language inspired by Python and E. It uses Nix, under the hook, for its packaging. Worth checking out if you are writing a new language and want to see how Nix help you.
• A Gentle Introduction to the Nix Family by Rommel Martinez.

Meetups

• Apr 4, 2017, NixOS April Meetup, Dublin, Ireland

  Two presentations:

  • Immutable deployments in Rapid7 by Ulrich Dangel
  • Basics of Nix by Kevin Cox

• (Future) Let us know if you are organizing a Nix / NixOS event.

Editor’s corner

A substantial part of the effort of publishing the “weekly” news is collecting the news in the first place. If you see anything cool, want to share a job, meetup or presentation add a comment with your item at https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-weekly. It’s super helpful!